Llike Ha'aretz, Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post sees Amram Mitzna, the Israeli Labor Party's new leader, as a sure loser in the upcoming election. He also sees Mitzna's selection as condemning Labor to the sidelines for the foreseeable future, instead of participating in a unity government as Labor has since Ariel Sharon's election. Mizna proposes unilaterally pulling Israeli troops out of the Gaza Strip and was the only Labor candidate who said he would negotiate with Arafat. He defeated his two main Labor Party rivals with a little over 50 percent of the vote.

Mohammad Parvin is the head of a group called Mission for Establishing Human Rights in Iran. Here he describes how leading U.S. scholars turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in Iran in order to preserve access to Iranian visas. The worst, according to Parvin, is Gary Sick, famous for his October surprise conspiracy theory in the early Reagan years. Sick serves on the board of the American Iranian Council, an outfit funded largely by oil companies that calls for unconditional restoration of diplomatic and business relations between the U.S. and the Iranian dictatorship. Prominent journalists have made the same sort of corrupt bargain as the professors, says Parvin. For example, he notes that Robin Wright of the Los Angeles Times, who "parrots official rhetoric labeling Khatemi the leading reformist in Iran, has unfettered access," while the few who report critically from Teheren are expelled.

Blogosphere belle Asparagirl responds vigorously, shall we say, to an Arab sympathizer who thinks her site isn't balanced enough.

We have witnessed many misuses of religion to advance political ends, but this is one of the most pathetic: "What would Jesus drive?" A fuel-efficient subcompact, of course. Preferably a Yugo. This is part of the left-wing attack on SUVs, which I guess we can understand (and condemn) as a political matter. But how Jesus enters into it is a mystery. The sad fact about this campaign, which will pay for television advertising in Iowa, North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri, is that it is backed by "mainstream" religious groups, like the National Council of Churches and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. The rationale underlying this campaign is the totalitarian canard that the personal is the political: "Economic issues are moral issues. There really isn't a decision in your life that isn't a moral choice," says the sponsor of the television campaign. Jesus himself, of course, dealt with the "personal is political" theory long ago, by taking precisely the opposite position: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's." He never showed a lot of interest in gas mileage.

Trunk, they say you can always tell a Harvard man. But you can't tell him much.

Here's the take of Ha'aretz on the Israeli Labor Party's election of dovish Amram Mitzna as its candidate for prime minister. The article makes it plain that Mitzna faces enormous difficulties in the upcoming election against (probably) Ariel Sharon. This would have been true of any Labor Party nominee. But, from the outside, Mitzna seems even harder than his rivals to elect. Moreover, a different nominee would have been a better bet to join a unity government after defeat, as Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the party leader defeated by Mitzna, did. According to Ha'aretz, Mitzna seems an unlikely partner in a Sharon government, although apparently he is already beginning to soften his objections to participating in such a unity government.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: I had missed Brian Lambert's original column on the unfunny one last Saturday in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "Now we know what Keillor reallly thinks, but why?" (Courtesy of OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today.) In this column Lambert notes that the unfunny one had submitted a variant of his original Salon piece to the Pioneer Press before the election but that it had been rejected by editorial page editor Steve Dornfeld.

For Non-Harvard Alums Only

For Non-Harvard Alums Only: Is it just me, or does Rocket Man seem a little touchy about Harvard Law School? I've only walked through the Yard a few times, but I have noticed the folks there are a little resistant to criticism.

Another pro-free speech, pro-American demonstration by thousands of Iranian students. One of the speakers said, "We demand unconditional release of Mr. Aghajari [professor threatened with execution for 'apostasy'] but demand freedom of speech and opinion for everyone and forever."

One of the clearest voices on criminal law issues, and the death penalty in particular, belongs to my good friend Bill Otis, formerly of the Justice Department and now an adjunct professor of law at George Mason University. Here, in the New York Times online death penalty forum, he exposes the problems with the death penalty moratorium movement. You'll probably want to skip the noise at the beginning of the link and scroll down a bit to the 8:44 a.m. Nov. 13 post for Bill's six point analysis.

Samizdata reminds us that today is National Ammo Day. For more information, check out the link. The basic idea is to "Celebrate the Second Amendment by buying an extra 100 rounds of ammunition on November 19th." Despite growing up in South Dakota, I've never been much of a gun person. I do remember, however, a hand-lettered sign that stood for many years next to the highway on the way into my home town, advertising a local store. It said: "Kones Korner." And then, underneath: "Beer. Guns. Ammo." South Dakota's version of one-stop shopping, circa 1962. Contemporary legal scholarship is becoming much more friendly toward gun rights than has been the case for for many years, and empirical data clearly show the value of firearms in deterring crime. I confess, however, that my own appreciation of gun rights arises mainly from how much they annoy liberals.

One of the great things about Power Line is the emails we get from readers. We try to reply to as many as we can, and we hope you'll keep sending in your comments. We have just gotten in several extremely interesting emails, one of which relates to the current political situation in South Dakota. Our reader, who is very well connected in South Dakota politics, says that jockeying for the 2004 Senate race is already underway. John Thune, he says, is not licking his wounds, but is actively planning for the future, in "full combat mode." He has been offered a high position in the Administration but will probably decline it, preferring to make some money by lobbying for a couple of years, then try for Daschle's Senate seat whether Daschle retires or not. His competition for the nomination will, of course, be Bill Janklow. Janklow has been the most popular politician in South Dakota for twenty years, but our reader nevertheless thinks Thune can beat him for the nomination. He believes President Bush will support Thune, not only out of loyalty--Thune gave up his House seat to run against Tim Johnson, rather than for Governor, at the request of the White House--but also because Thune is viewed as a more loyal and reliable Republican. He is also, of course, much younger. Janklow's personal and political alliance with Tom Daschle served him well when he was Governor, but will be a liability (in Republican circles, anyway) when he runs for Daschle's seat. And, while Janklow is very able and has been tremendously popular, he also has the highest negatives of any South Dakota politician. Can Thune win if Daschle runs for re-election? I think so. Daschle's strength has been his ability to bring home the bacon for South Dakotans. As Minority Leader, that ability will be much diminished. He will increasingly be seen as a querulous and ineffective obstructor of President Bush's policies, which are popular in South Dakota. And in two years, the President will be on the ballot.

Except for putting us on the spot about what the heck we're doing during the work day, Joshua Sharf is fast becoming our favorite correspondent. His latest message picks up where Rocket Man left off below:

"As for Difficult Conversations, I have a copy of the book, and see where the notion could be very useful in a business environment. It's not just about negotiation, but about how to talk about subjects that we would rather avoid, and talk about them constructively. Criticizing an employee, handling a conflict between work and social relationships, etc. Businessmen and lawyers need these skills. Incoming students are frequently unprepared to talk about real-life work examples, since they don't know the basic ethical and legal constraints involved. So it makes sense to apply the skill to a common social problem the students have probably already encountered.

"The problem seems to be, as always, in the underlying assumptions of the cases involved. 'How to break up with your boyfriend' is already a little loaded. Why not girlfriend instead? But more importantly, we all know what's coming next: 'How to confront a racist,' 'How to tell your parents you're gay,' 'How to tell your company you're about to whistleblow on their enviro-racist policies.' 'How to defend yourself against unfair charges of workplace bias' probably does not make the list."

Thanks to National Review Online for linking to the Wall Street Journal editorialist Jason Riley's wonderful column today putting out the call for James Bond to go after Osama bin Laden. The column is "Stopping evildoers: James Bond can where others fail."

Speaking of constitutional law, here is Stuart Taylor's take in the National Journal on upcoming Supreme Court developments. Taylor admits that the scenarios he sets forth for retirements and nominations constitute speculation based on grapevine gossip, not inside information. Let's hope so, because many of his scenarios are not happy ones. For example, if Chief Justice Rehnquist retires, the open spot should go to a strong conservative such as Harvie Wilkinson or Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit where I sometimes practice. Edith Jones would also be a good pick, but not for the sake of nominating a woman. In no way would Jones be viewed as a plus by female swing voters. Bush should not pick Alberto Gonzalez to replace Rehnquist because his record as a judge in Texas was anything but conservative. Like Tayor, I have no knowledge as to what President Bush is likely to do. But he does seem to learn from his father's mistakes. And one of his father's biggest mistakes was the nomination of Justice Souter.

Nice post on Harvard Law School, Rocket Man. If I recall correctly, Professor Kennedy was a visiting prof at Stanford Law School some years after I graduated. His course on constitutional law was so bad that, due to student demand, the late John Kaplan -- a criminal law and evidence professor and an old-fashioned liberal, at least in my day -- courageously set up an unofficial constitutional law course so that those who wanted to learn something about the constitution would have the opportunity to do so. This, of course, led to charges of racism and whatever else.

I've done a little follow-up research on Dorothy Rabinowitz' piece on political correctness at Harvard Law School. On the whole, this appears to be a pretty typical example of the dialectic that has played out at countless universities across the country. First, someone says or does something that is arguably offensive; here, a student used "Nigs" as a shorthand term in his notes on a discussion of a case. This became an issue because his notes were posted on some kind of internal web site. Second, an organized victims' grievance group--here, the Black Law Students' Association--purports to be shocked at the awfulness of it all, and says the school's administration is responsible because it hasn't done enough to indoctrinate students or limit their speech rights. And third--here is the critical step--the administration responds in the only way it knows how, by appointing a committee (stocked with members of the complaining group) to assess ways of enhancing diversity, etc., at the school. This article in the Boston Globe sheds additional light on the controversy. On the whole, the Law School has been somewhat less craven than the average administration, and its faculty includes more vigorous defenders of free speech than is usually the case. Note in particular the role played by Alan Dershowitz. And, while the newly-formed Committee on Healthy Diversity has announced that it intends to draft a speech code, Dean Robert Clark has already said that he would be very reluctant to actually implement such a code.

Ms. Rabinowitz' article focuses largely on the Law School's new requirement that incoming students attend a session on how to have "difficult conversations." She does not note that this isn't quite as much out of the blue as it may seem; for a number of years, a group at the Law School called the Harvard Negotiation Project has taught courses and published books and articles on various aspects of negotiation. They have written a book called "Difficult Conversations," which is described on the Law School's website as "a national bestseller now available in more than 15 languages." So it was relatively natural for the Law School to turn to its own faculty's work product, which might not be quite as goofy as it sounds. Of course, whether these "difficult conversations" sessions serve any real educational purpose is highly doubtful; the Globe's article concludes by quoting a student who noted that: "At the first session of one workshop, the conversation dealt with how to break up with your boyfriend."

The Globe article also clarifies one fact that is puzzling in Ms. Rabinowitz' account. She refers to a second controversy arising out of a professor's statement in class that "Marxists, feminists and blacks had contributed nothing to tort law," which on its face is odd. The Globe quotes the professor, much more plausibly, as saying that "feminism, Marxism and black studies" have contributed nothing to tort law. As so clarified, the statement is true.

Having said what I can in defense of the Law School, it is obvious that it is a far different place from what I experienced in the early 1970's. At that time the atmosphere was not unlike a Marine boot camp. Students were expected to be able to make and defend arguments and to stand up to often-withering cross-examination by professors. This was based on the idea--which now seems almost quaint--that such training would stand them in good stead once they got out into the real, dog-eat-dog legal world. Sensitivity to our feelings was not something that we expected, nor was it something our professors delivered. And, in that faraway time, I don't recall that professors treated black students much differently from white students.

The aspect of this controversy that I find most troubling is the treatment of Professor Charles Nesson--a young Turk when I was a student, now a senior statesman. During the flap over an allegedly offensive email that followed the "Nigs" episode, Professor Nesson suggested a mock trial of the offending student with himself acting as defense counsel. This suggestion was considered so far beyond the pale that Professor Nesson has been relieved of his first-year teaching duties. Such an outcome is incompatible not only with free speech, but with the most elementary understanding of the role of a lawyer in an adversarial system of justice.

Oh, one more thing--the professor who has sided most vociferously with the anti-free speech forces is Randall Kennedy, a leftist whose latest book is titled: "Nigger: The Strange History of a Troublesome Word."

Clifford Orwin is a poltical science professor at the University of Toronto and a very smart guy. Like Mark Steyn, he has a regular column in Canada's National Post newspaper, and we will have to add him to our roster of regulars. His most recent column is "Reading the fine print in Osama's tape." (Thanks to Bruce Sanborn for the tip.)

HonestReporting.com also blows the whistle on the leftists at "Reporters Without Borders". This group has ranked Israel number 92 in the world in its "free press" index. Thus, Israel trails Lebanan (at 56) and the Palestinian Authority (at 82). The borderless reporters present these rankings even though Lebanon recently prosecuted a reporter for attending a conference in Washington D.C. where an Israeli offical was present, according to HonestReporting. And the PA has a record of violence towards journalists that even the bogus index acknowledges. Such is the mentality of some reporters who help shape the "world opinion" that Colin Powell and most Democrats believe we must obtain the approval of before we proceed to defend our security interests. Indeed, these reporters and their pals at the Associated Press probably help shape the opinions of some Democrats themselves.

The man had an alternative defense too, Trunk: he's a "product of the 1960s and '70s counterculture." Other products of that counterculture may be in control at the Associated Press. Here, HonestReporting.com calls our attention to AP's spin on the latest massacre in Hebron on the West Bank. AP informs us that the Muslims of Hebron are among the most devout and the Jewish settlers among the most radical. A stronger case could be made for the reverse proposition. The history of fanaticism among the devout Muslims of Hebron goes back to at least the 1930s when they slaughtered scores of Jews. And while it is radical, in a sense, for Jews to re-settle in such a hate-filled environment, Hebron is Judaism's second most holy city because the Jewish patriarchs, including Abraham, are buried there.

We have studiously ignored this story until now, and promise to do so again in the future. But how many guys can say this? "Man says sex partner's death was just a 'terrible accident.'"

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: From the unfunny one's hometown newspaper, Brian Lambert weighs in with "Supporters defend Keillor's columns on Coleman." Mark Brian Lambert down as a supporter.

The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal Web site has now posted Dorothy Rabinowitz's long piece on the Orwellian forces in play at Harvard Law School: "Difficult conversations."

Our friends at RealClearPolitics have identified several columns I would have missed but for them. One supplements the Pipes column below, Frank Gaffney's chilling "Lurking in the Jayna Davis files."

Two post-election recaps are also worth a look: Morton Kondracke's "Democrats lost economy issue on election day," and Ronald Brownstein's "Replay of Reagan-era voting patterns is not good news for Democrats."

Rocket Man, a reader writes to observe that Guy Hunt was Alabama's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, and another Republican followed him. We can neverthless crank up our favorite song of this election season, "Another one bites the dust" (lyrics and music via RealOnePlayer). I believe that in Louisiana, however, President Bush is aiming to make some more history by helping elect the first Republican senator in that state since Reconstruction.

From Dick Cheney's lips...well, you know the rest: "I am confident Louisiana will elect Suzie Terrell to the United States Senate." Reading the tea leaves in the Washington Times account of the vice president's appearance at a fundraiser for Ms. Terrell in Louisiana yesterday, I believe the White House must have Landrieu's seat in the leaning-R column: "Cheney appears at fundraiser for Louisiana hopeful." The Times editorial on the race is also worth a look: "Showdown in Louisiana."

Daniel Pipes's weekly New York Post column this morning is excellent--"Know thy terrorists." And the Post's editorial--"Mary Berry's failed coup"--should be added to Deacon's lengthening list of exhibits in support of the observation that liberals lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their objectives.

Here is Steve Sailer's post-mortem on California's gubernatorial election. His analysis is optimistic for conservatives; I had lost track of the fact that Bill Simon, despite the many problems with his campaign, lost only 47%-42%. Sailer points out that the much-vaunted Hispanic vote is only 10% in California, and argues that Republicans can win in California the same way they did in many other states in 2002--by motivating, dominating and turning out the white vote.

One more narrow win in the GOP column, as Alabama's incumbent governor, Democrat Don Siegelman, concedes to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley, who will be Alabama's first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

This piece by Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, is called "Terrorists, Liberals, and the EU." It covers a sickening array of developments in Egypt, the European Union, on American college campuses, and within Israel. For example, according to Glick, Cairo hosted this week's Palestinian terror conference between Fatah and Hamas. The European Union sponsored the conference. The EU's stated role was to facilitate dialogue as part of its ongoing effort to stop terrorism. Glick reports that, in furtherance of this goal, the EU recently held talks with Muhammed Naifa, mastermind of several terrorist attacks, in an effort to persuade him to limit Fatah terror attacks to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. This is the kind of thinking that constitutes the "world opinion" that Colin Powell and most Democrats don't wish to proceed without. Glick goes on to show that the American campus left and Israel's own messianic left are as treacherously irresponsible as the EU when it comes to Palestinian terrorism. This column is not for the faint of heart.

More on Minnesota'a Angry Humorist: The Claremont Institute has now posted Bruce Sanborn's take on the unfunny one's most recent Salon rantings. Here in printer-friendly version we proudly present "Sing goddess of the wrath of Garrison."

David Rosenbaum, in the New York Times, explains why the Democrats may not be able to use filibusters to block much of the Republican agenda in the Senate.

Real Clear Politics is reporting that a Republican poll in Louisiana has Suzanne Terrell up eight points over Mary Landrieu.

Reacting to Woodward's book Bush at War, James Robbins of National Review Online points out that Woodward's "revelation" that the U.S. bribed Afghan warlords is not news and Woodward's suggestion that these bribes won the war is not true.

For some reason, the British newspapers publish more information on the war than the American newspapers. This was true during the Afghanistan conflict, and is likely to be true again in the event of war in Iraq. Yesterday the U.K. Observer published an interesting and optimistic assessment of likely Allied tactics should war occur in Iraq. The article is titled, "Surrender or Die, Allies Warn Saddam's Soldiers." Of course, as the article itself notes, the many leaks of Allied war plans are intended largely to demoralize Saddam's generals and convince them to overthrow Saddam rather than fight.

John Miller, in National Review Online, says that the Democrats are making a partisan issue out of the fact that Osama bin Laden is apparently alive and still at large. He sees this as a potentially serious problem for the Bush Administration. Well, maybe, but I doubt it. For this to be a real problem, voters would have to take seriously the idea that Democrats would pursue bin Laden more vigorously or effectively than President Bush. Absent not only a personality transplant but a philosophy transplant, it is hard to imagine the Democrats posturing themselves as advocates of a no-holds-barred attack on terrorists. As we have written before on this site, there is room to get around to Bush's right on the war, but the Democrats are unable or unwilling to do it. There is a second reason why emphasizing bin Laden's survival is a risky approach for Democrats. It is an issue over which they have no control. The Democrats are used to blocking Republican initiatives in Congress, and then criticizing Republican presidents for being unable to get anything done. But they have no way to block the pursuit of bin Laden. The Democrats could put a lot of eggs in the "we haven't caught bin Laden yet" basket, only to find that a few days later, bin Laden turns up dead. If they define killing bin Laden as the criterion for success in the war against terrorism, they will have to live with the consequences if and when he is killed. I personally would not bet on bin Laden to be alive in November 2004.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democrats' effort to retrospectively spin the Georgia Senate election. The Democrats allege that Saxby Chambliss defeated Max Cleland by raising questions about his patriotism. On a weekend talk show, John Kerry said that: "What they did to Max Cleland...a veteran...who lost three limbs in VietNam...and they challenge his patriotism--that sickens everybody in our country." Left unexplained is how a tactic that "sickens everybody" could have been successful. The answer, of course, is that Chambliss never questioned Cleland's patriotism; to do so would have been stupid and suicidal. Rather, Chambliss disagreed with Cleland about various policy issues relating to taxes, missile defense and the homeland security bill. The same Democratic spin is visible elsewhere, too; in Minnesota the Democrats are making a similar claim, that Norm Coleman ran a dirty campaign against Paul Wellstone in which he impugned Wellstone's patriotism. Wellstone, unlike Cleland, might have been vulnerable on this score, but in any event Coleman never did any such thing, always attributing good motives to Wellstone and emphasizing that his disagreements with Wellstone were disagreements over policy. It seems to me that the current Democratic spin effort is part of their larger strategy of neutralizing the terrorist threat as an issue that favors Republicans. They want to disqualify every effort to point out differences between Republican and Democratic candidates on security policy as an impermissible attack on the Democrat's patriotism. This ties in with their earlier attack on the Republicans for "politicizing" the war. While the Democrats are relentless spin masters, and have shown the ability to revise history and move public opinion over time--Clarence Thomas is the definitive example--it is hard to see how this strategy can work. The voters are more concerned about security than anything else, and they want to know where candidates stand on security-related issues.

David Frum on why "Colin Powell should have been fired yesterday." The reason -- Powell's leaks to Bob Woodward. Frum notes that Woodward's new book Bush at War "is essentially an edited transcript of Powell leaks, all of them calculated to injure this administration and undermine its policies on the very eve of military action against Iraq." One can disagree with Frum about when Powell should have been fired, but his bottom line seems indisputable. As Frum puts it, "instead of representing the United States to the world, Powell sees his job as representing the world to the United States. It's time for him to go."

The Washington Times is reporting this morning that British special forces are hunting bin Laden in Yemen. We carried this report on Power Line two weeks ago, based on information from the Debka File. The Times says that the intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts was gathered by the Mossad from Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. This is consistent with the claim that Debka has sources in or close to the Mossad. If Debka is right about this one, it will be a major coup.

The fancy exterminationist hatred of Arabs for Israel infests Columbia University, and the academic elites seem to resent when we notice. Consider the column by Stanley Kurtz in this morning's New York Post, "Campus Conformity." Is anybody going to shout "fire"?

The title of this Washington Post article by David Kay, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq says it all --"With More At Stake, Less Will Be Verified." As Kay explains, "the multi-lateral culture isn't comfortable with the tough measures needed to root out hidden weapons." We see this clearly in my post earlier today about how Hans Blix doesn't want to alienate the Iraqis this time. Towards the end of the article, Kay shows why, even if inspections succeed, regime change is necessary. It may be possible to destroy weapons, but one cannot so easily destroy the knowledge and capacity that enables them to be produced. And one can only destroy the political will to use that knowledge and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction by destroying the political system that leads the state to seek such capabilities.

This is the only report I've seen so far on the Landrieu/Terrell debate on Meet the Press this morning. It seems pretty straightforward and it's hard to tell what impressions the candidates made, but it appears that Terrell more or less held her own. There are four more debates to come before the runoff election, some of which will probably be seen by more people in Louisiana than this morning's show.

Here is a quick report on the foiled hijacking of an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. The days when one guy with a knife could seriously think about hijacking an airliner are long gone, which makes me think this character was a lone nut and not an al Qaeda or Hezbollah operative. El Al has a great reputation for security, which I am sure is well-deserved. But what surprised me the one time I flew El Al (New York to Tel Aviv) was how casual the security seemed. I had expected something much more intense. But then, I suppose it took very little conversation to assure the security person that my wife and I were not terrorists. That's the basic difference between their airport security and ours--they are actually looking for terrorists; we are just going through the motions.

Al Gore is in full campaign mode. Apparently having concluded from the recent elections that the path to success is to attack President Bush as violently as possible, Gore is giving interviews like this one in Time, in which he characterizes the President's policies as "catastrophic." In particular, he claims that President Bush has the worst economic record of any President since Herbert Hoover. (This has a familiar ring; Bill Clinton said the same thing, falsely, about the first President Bush in 1992.)

Just for fun, I decided to compare the current economy with conditions two years into the first term of the last several Democratic presidents. I checked the statistics for unemployment, inflation and change in gross domestic product. Here are the results:

______________Unemployment___Inflation Rate____Change/GDP

Truman, 1947:_______3.9%____________14.6%________--0.4%

Kennedy, 1962:______5.5%____________1.1%__________5.7%

Johnson, 1965:______4.5%____________1.6%__________6.3%

Carter, 1978:________6.1%____________7.6%__________5.5%

Clinton, 1994:________6.1%____________2.6%__________4.0%

Democrat Average:___5.2%_____________5.5%__________4.2%

Compare these numbers to the current economic data:

Bush, 2002:_________5.7%___________0.2%________3.1% (3rd Qtr.)

This means that the average Democrat Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) two years into each of the last five Democratic administrations is 10.7; the current Misery Index, two years into the Bush administration is 5.9.

Of course, none of these comparisons include the truly bad postwar years, like 1980, the last year of the Carter administration, when unemployment was 7.1% and inflation 13.5%, for a horrifying Misery Index of 20.6. Gross domestic product declined that year, too.

It is easy to argue with any particular set of economic data as conditions are constantly changing and, to some degree, the manner in which these data are compiled also changes over time. Nevertheless, these numbers not only demonstrate the absurdity of Gore’s hyperbolic claims, they also show why the Democrats have not been able to get much traction with their attacks on the economy.

We're still trying to figure out what to make of Bob Woodward's inside account of the administration's deliberations on the war. The Newsweek out tomorrow features Evan Thomas's "In the War Room." Thomas's article provides a handy quick-take on the Woodward project. (Courtesy of our friends at RealClearPolitics.)

The prolific Mark Steyn is back with a good column today as well, "Idea of 'women's issues' a lie." Great quote: "If I've got a choice between Condi Rice and Ted Kennedy, I'll go with the broad. If it's Don Rumsfeld vs. Nancy Pelosi, I'll vote my gender." (Ditto.)

Thanks also to our friend Bruce Sanborn for pointing out James Lileks's "Bleat" of this past Friday, "And now, disgust." To me it reads like some kind of masterpiece.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: Our friend and faithful reader Bruce Sanborn is chairman of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanhip and Minnesota's foremost student of the unfunny one. As Rocket Man mentioned yesterday, twenty years ago Bruce wrote a long, thoughtful analysis of the unfunny one's first Lake Wobegon novel and deduced, solely from a close reading of the text, that the guy was seething with hatred of America. The review appeared in the first incarnation of the Claremont Review of Books, the one that had to be put to sleep before it bankrupted the Claremont Institute, and is unfortunately unavailable in an electronic format. We have sent Bruce to the basement of his magnificient White Bear Lake home in search of a hard copy of his old review that we can transcribe into an electronic format. We have asked him not to come back upstairs until he finds it. Please stay tuned.

Today Bruce has forwarded his latest meditation on the unfunny one. Continuing our collective efforts to plumb his depths and to interpret his Salon rants, we proudly present Bruce's contribution in its entirety, entitled "Sing, goddess, of the wrath – or then again...":

"The Trunk, deacon, and Hindrocket have all blogged about Garrison Keillor over the last week, but they didn’t mention the Iliad or praise Keillor as a political artist. Oversight, or just leaving that for me?

"Because Keillor is a talented writer and neighbor and has been writing about politics lately, I read his most recent Salon piece, 'Minnesota’s shame,' several times. First time through, I noticed Keillor, who is generally known as a humorist, isn't aiming for laughs; the passion he shows (and seeks) has no relatives in the laughter family. This time he even avoids the modulated irony he typically takes to the public. He's off his stride. He's angry.

"Minnesotans remember the last time Keillor got angry in public, back in the 1980s, when he let us know he was not happy with us and then packed up and left the state, for years. This time, however, he’s come out fighting, and I sense he’s taking a stand and not leaving. Good. Courage and patriotism are good. In 'Minnesota's shame,' Keillor is much more direct, political and sustained in his attack than I have seen him in the past, but he seems to have lost control.

"Keillor pours out admiration for Paul Wellstone and savagely attacks Coleman with intent to assassinate. He states that Coleman is evil, that some people Keillor knows think Coleman killed Wellstone, and that he (Keillor) doesn't agree with them but doesn't say why; Keillor points to Scripture and calls on God; like an angry prophet, he ends: 'Sinner beware.' As his title 'Minnesota’s shame' suggests, however, Keillor doesn't think Norm Coleman is the only sinner God should straighten out.

"On my second read-through, little waves from my memory of Homer’s Iliad lapped against me. I’m not saying Keillor is Achilles, but in politics, when control slips and things get nasty, anger is often the passion advancing the action. Angered at Agamemnon and the Greeks, Achilles left his fellows and sulked in his tent; then Patroclus, his friend-in-arms, died, and Achilles burst from his tent furious and murderous. What explained it? Homer opened the poem with this line 'Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.'

"So, that’s it: Keillor’s anger slipped the bounds of reason, and he wrote what he wrote. Or is that it? On my third reading, I focused on Keillor talking about himself as a performer who’s been performing for a long time. I got wondering whether his essay might not be Keillor exercising his art. Was Keillor acting more like Homer than like Achilles, more like artist than like actor? Many people idolize Keillor, and he has sway over liberal-progressives in Minnesota and beyond. Certainly, it’s possible Keillor wants to rally liberal Democrats after virtually nothing came up roses for them on election day. Keillor calculated that irony and humor would not rouse their passions the way a hot-blooded jeremiad would.

"He’d slam and damn Coleman and the Republicans for backing Coleman all the way. He’d say the Republicans got in a car named Unpatriotic, cynically left Main Street, drove right past Fiscal Responsibility Avenue, and then, foul to the core, drove over the hearts of all the people who cared about America and about the Americans who died on 9/11 – and to their eternal shame, Minnesotans rewarded the Republicans with the election; that’s what he’d say; that’s what he said. The Democrats, well, he’d say, they must remember Wellstone and walk like him: 'Paul walked the walk. He was a wonder.' Keillor would urge them to show passion for the not-rich and the not-privileged. But mostly, they had to hate Norm Coleman and the Republicans. Keillor would have his followers’ passion, not their minds. He would excite them to Achilles-like wrath.

"That then may explain what Keillor was up to in writing 'Minnesota’s shame,' but of course if it does, what must Keillor think of his fellow Democrats -- I mean if he calculated that with them he should play the demagogue?"

Did Neville Chamberlain get op-ed pieces published after he failed to deliver "peace in our time?" Probably not. But Shimon Peres does, and here he delivers a typically fatuous product. Nearly every sentence invites dissection, but perhaps the most foolish is this: "The chance that the [Palestinians] will cooperate with us [in putting a stop to terrorism] is remote unless they can identify a vested interest in such cooperation, namely a political horizon." Peres fails to note that the Palestinians had a vested political interest in such cooperation for years, namely keeping the likes of Peres himself in power -- politicians who were hell-bent on giving the Palestinians nearly everything they asked for. Yet this wasn't enough to promote Palestinian "cooperation." On the other hand, Peres' most foolish sentence might be this: "I have discussed this matter of late with high-profile Palestinian leaders and was given the impression that they were prepared to undertake this three-pronged endeavor [Peres' latest "roads to peace"]. Then there is Peres' impassioned finale: "The pace [to resolution of the conflict] must be stepped up and a solution found that is acceptable to most countries of the world, and to the greater part of the Israeli and Palestinian populations: two enlightened states one alongside the other, in a Middle East whose economic achievements surmount the causes of strife." This man is delusional. Is Dr. Krauthammer in the house?

The Washington Post's editorial board sides with the view of the U.S. as to how inspections in Iraq should be handled. The Post finds that Hans Blix and Kofi Annan have already "lapsed back into the old routine of misusing [U.N.] inspectors" and urges the administration not to accept that routine. This otherwise solid editorial errs, however, in stating that the purpose of the Security Council's resolution "is not to dispatch international inspectors on a prolonged hunt for the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein has produced and hidden." That is precisely what Kofi Annan and key members of the Security Council have in mind, and the more prolonged the better. To them, this exercise is about avoiding war, not finding and eliminating weapons of mass destruction. The Post's news story below makes that clear enough.

Here's a surprise: the United States and the United Nations differ on how Iraqi inspections should be carried out. So reports today's Washington Post. According to the Post, U.N. inspector Hans Blix wants a "more measured approach" than the U.S. does to "achieving disarmament." The Post also reports that Blix "is trying to change the culture of the arms inspectors, whose predecessors aroused deep animosity in Iraq for using tough tactics to gain access to [inspection] sites." We trust that Blix will be more sensitve to the concerns of Saddam Hussein.

I'm laughing out loud at your post on the Amherst Marxists' apartment, Trunk. Gosh, Rocket Man and I did much better than that when we roomed together at Dartmouth. We even managed to graduate in four years. I guess we weren't true Marxists.

Our search for a shaft of sunlight to brighten the day proved worthwhile. Don't miss this from the Onion: "Marxists' Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn't Work." And pass it on to your college-age kids. (Courtesy of No Left Turns.)

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: We aren't through with the unfunny one yet. Our reader Brian Ward is the proprietor of the Fraters Libertas blog. Brian's excellent account of Norm Coleman's visit to the Wild game at the Xcel Center in St. Paul the Saturday before the election, an account from which we quoted extensively, provided a genuine indicator of coming events. Brian is a long-time observer of the unfunny one, and has written us to assert that the unfunny one's unfunniness is not a recent development:

"Regarding the humor of Garrison Keillor, I've listened to PHC for about 10 years and I must say that its never been particularly amusing. He does attempt a lot of jokes and delivers punch lines all the time in his monologs, but they typically aim (and land) somewhere in the space between cornpone Hee Haw gags and Boone and Erickson style 'Ole and Lena' jokes. And the content of the sketch comedy rarely rises above the level of a 4H club skit (though I will say some of the performers are genuinely talented).

"Part of his inability to be funny may be the lack of critical review he receives, either professionally or from his audience. Since ratings (relative to commercial radio) don't matter on NPR, he's under no pressure to appeal to a wide audience (who would demand that he actually be funny before they tuned in). Furthermore, the relatively small segment of the population that does appreciate his radio antics seem to be of the type who just appreciate his political stances and are apt to give courtesy laughter to anyone whom they presume is fighting the good fight. I've attended performances of PHC and overwhelmingly the laughter that comes from the audience is courtesy laughter, not a spontaneous reaction to what's being said. It's the kind of laughter that says 'yes, I recognize what you're doing is an attempt at humor (particularly since I've seen the punch line coming since you started the bit) and since I agree with what you're attempting and I want to support you, I'll make sounds with my throat commonly recognized as laughter.' It's the kind of laugher you hear at the punch lines during your kid's high school production of 'The Music Man' or heard coming out of urban sophisticates at Uptown [Minneapolis movie theater] showings of 'Bowling for Columbine.'

"This is the reason that Garrison can tell the same two jokes during every performance and get the same reaction. 'People in St. Paul don't like people in Minneapolis' (roar of laughter from crowd)...'I like to call Minneapolis...the Paris of the Midwest...' (roar of laughter, followed by an explosion of applause).

"The strength of PHC is the music (and not the Keillor sung torch ballads, mind you- -these range from quaint to outright embarrassing). The guest artists he attracts, from genres as diverse as classical to jazz to bluegrass to country are consistently outstanding. And his reports from Lake Woebegone are often nuanced and beautiful and I've gotten a lot out of hearing them over the years."

I think the Krauthammer piece posted below also helps us understand Keillor's reaction to Norm Coleman. Watching this one from a distance, it seemed to me that it was Coleman's moderation, good looks, and excellent demeanor that drove Keillor's otherwise inexplicably rabid attack. Although the Minnesota liberals accused Coleman of viciously attacking Wellstone and Mondale, it may actually have been the fact that he didn't -- the respectful way, for example, he referred to Mondale as the Vice President throughout the debate even as he was burying this relic -- that they made them so resentful. Sort of like the way certain liberals (Geraldo Rivera comes to mind) hated Kenneth Starr even more after they found that he hadn't engaged in extra-marital sex while investigating Bill Clinton.

Unlike Krauthammer, I'm not a former psychiatrist (he recommends Thorazine for the liberal elites). But the vitriolic way certain liberals react to those conservatives (often moderate conservatives) who seem to lack inner demons suggests that their hatred has less to do with policy disagreement than with envy of apparent psychological well-being.

Democrat David Kranz, writing in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, says that people close to Tom Daschle do not expect him to seek re-election to the Senate in 2004. He is likely to run for President; Kranz writes, in what appears to be a non sequitur, that "The perception that he was one of the national losers in [the 2002 election] may drive him closer to a presidential bid." Lots of luck. He'll be competing against another of this year's losers, Dick Gephardt. Kranz says that South Dakota Democrats are scratching their heads over who might replace Daschle as a Senatorial candidate; none of the alternatives appear strong. The Republicans, on the other hand, have two extremely strong candidates, Bill Janklow and John Thune. One of the anomalies of current politics is that the Democrats are competitive in the Senate, despite the fact that a large majority of states usually vote Republican. (Logically, the Democrats should be more competitive in the House, given that their strength is disproportionately in the large-population states.) Nowhere is this anomaly more sriking than in the Dakotas, two Republican states with four Democratic Senators. The Dakotas are the key to the Democrats remaining competitive in the Senate, and starting in 2004, the balance of power will likely start to shift, especially if Daschle does not seek re-election. By the way, Kranz concludes his column by pooh-poohing suspicions about the late influx of votes from the Pine Ridge reservation that swung this year's election to Tim Johnson.

Charles Krauthammer considers the pronouncements of Bill Moyers and, paraphrasing Oliver Wendell Holmes, concludes that "three generations of left-wing idiocy are enough."

Of the countries ruled by Islamofascists, Iran has the most developed opposition, partly because of that country's pro-Western past and partly because it has suffered the longest under Islamist rule. Most recently, Professor Hashem Aghajari has been sentenced to be hanged by the Islamic courts for arguing, as this Associated Press Report puts it, that "each generation should be able to interpret Islam on its own, without clerical guidance." Since the death sentence was imposed, students in Tehran have protested almost daily. The photograph below shows students holding pictures of Aghajari. Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, has criticized the death sentence, and a grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini joined in yesterday's protest. It is noteworthy that the Associated Press, which we have often criticized, refers to the clerics who imposed the death sentence as "Islamic hard-liners." The New York Times continues to call them "conservatives." I expect major surprises from Iran over the next several years; that country will play a pivotal role if President Bush is to achieve his goal of liberating the Arab world.

The Indonesian police have done a good job of cracking the Bali bombing case. They captured the plotter who owned one of the vehicles that contained a bomb; this has allowed them to learn the identities of the other members of the gang. Their names have now been released and photographs have been published; they are believed to be hiding somewhere in Indonesia. The Sydney Morning Herald sums up the state of the investigation. The chief plotter, Imam Samudra, fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan and studied explosives there.

This morning's Washington Post features the first excerpt from Bob Woodward's forthcoming book, Bush at War. The excerpt is "A Struggle for the President's Heart and Mind: Powell Journeyed From Isolation to Winning the Argument on Iraq."

I find Woodward's breathless you-are-there insider accounts written in his trademark leaden prose to be virtually unreadable. I'm also usually disappointed if not mystified by the administration officials who either confide in Woodward or use him for their own purposes. My reading of the excerpt this morning suggests that this group includes Colin Powell, his assistant Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice; it does not appear to include Richard Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. Deacon is our veteran WaPologist, and I solicit his help on this point.

This morning's New York Times also has an extremely interesing story about JFK's prescription drugs, "In Kennedy file, a portrait of illness and pain." Here the relevant standard of comparison is probably Elvis, but the Times account offers us litle help in placing JFK's usage along the Presley continuum. The Times does helpfully note that, based on a listening to the administration's taped Cuban missile crisis deliberatons, JFK did not sound impaired. So there!

Here's a good piece on blogging by Linda Seebach in the Rocky Mountain News. She concludes: "The writer A. J. Liebling famously said, 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,' but owning a press is a rather expensive proposition. Blogging isn't, and that's why it matters to democracy."

You know it's a really slow news night when we start talking about UFO's. The Sci Fi cable TV channel reports that it is sending a team of archaeologists to Roswell, New Mexico to "verify once and for all" whether a UFO piloted by three aliens crash-landed there in 1947--as one humorist has pointed out, shortly before Al Gore was allegedly "born." The Sci Fi channel promises a "smoking gun" when its story airs on November 22. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you get your hands on a cult movie classic: "Six Days in Roswell," directed by Roger Nygard, the brother of Power Line reader Steve Nygard. The semi-documentary movie traces the odyssey of a young Minnesotan who journeys to Roswell for the annual alien festival. Only a few of the characters in the movie--generally speaking, the least wacky ones--are actors. It is extremely funny.

Governor-elect Bob Ehrlich will rescind the moratorium on the dealth penalty in Maryland immediately upon becoming governor in January, according to this report from the Washington Post, The Post also reports that Ehrlich has renewed his pledge not to raise taxes despite the state's $600 million deficit. Marylanders like me already pay extremely high taxes (compared to Virginians, for example) for mediocre services. Waste, fraud, and corruption are a way of life here in Maryland, which, in my view, is the main reason Ehrlich was elected in this overwhelmingly Democratic state

Keillor was funny once. He captured certain aspects of Minnesota culture in a way that was amusing and seemingly affectionate. Twenty years ago, however, our friend Bruce Sanborn wrote an article in which he argued that Keillor hated America. At the time, that assertion was heretical; now, it seems prescient. If we can find Bruce's article, we'll link to it.

I agree with Rocket Man's comment that the public is seeing a side of liberalism that isn't pretty. The media has always portrayed those on the "right" as haters, while treating liberals as high-minded, gentle victims of the right's irrational anger. This image is reinforced, for example, by endless Hollywood productions about blacklisting in the 1950s. Having been on the left, and knowing many more liberals than conservatives for most of my life, it's long been clear to me that liberals take a back seat to no one when it comes to hating. And, as one moves a little further to the left, one finds that the real object of the hatred is often America.

One manifestation of this hatred is Hollywood's love affair with Fidel Castro, discussed in a Washington Post op-ed piece. Strangely, the piece does not appear on the Post's web site; if I find it later I will post it. Hernandez notes that "the dictator exerts some sort of snake-charmer appeal that makes hardened Hollywood veterans swoon like pre-teen girls at a Backstreet Boys concert." That appeal, I would suggest, is his ability to survive as a thorn in America's side. The swooners listed by Hernandez are Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Woody Harrelson, Matt Dillon, Ed Asner, Shirley MacLaine, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Oliver Stone, and Stephen Spielberg, who recently pronounced his dinner with Castro "the most important hours of my life."

G. Chimes is my "conservative cousin" from New York. Thanks for pointing us to Miller's piece on the libertarian party, George. I have a quetion for Rocket Man and Trunk. Do you guys think Keillor was funny at one time? He was hugely popular with a certain type of person here in the Washington, D.C. area, but this happened at about the time I stopped listening to National Public Radio and stopped respecting the tastes of the kind of people with whom he was hugely popular. As a result, I never had much exposure to him. So I'm curious about your views, expecially since, as Rocket Man says, it's a slow news weekend.

It's a slow news weekend, so I guess we're doing culture. If you're not already familiar with Arts & Letters Daily, you should check it out. ALD was out of business briefly, but is now back. It's a very mixed bag; it links to articles on literature, philosophy, politics and the arts; some are really good while others are annoying. But you can always find something fun there.

I have searched the ends of the earth via the Internet today for a column or item that shows a glimmer of wit that might bring a smile. No such luck.

One of my favorite literary creations is John Updike's fictional alter ego, the American Jewish novelist Henry Bech. Updike has come back to Bech off and on for the past thirty years in three books filled with stories of great wit and insight. If you have never read any of the stories, a handy overview is provided in "Review of the Complete Henry Bech."

Updike's publisher has made one of the Bech stories available for free on its Web site, a story from Updike's 1982 book Bech is Back--the story "White on White." (The Bea referred to in the first paragraph is Bech's wife. The story immediately follows "Bech Wed." In "White on White," Bech and Bea have just separated.) I commend the story to your attention, for no reason other than that I think it's funny.

Louisiana Senate candidates Suzanne Terrell and Mary Landrieu will be on Meet the Press tomorrow morning; Tim Russert will moderate a debate. We'll be interested to get impressions from any readers who watch it. I'm not sure whether Terrell is ready for prime time. On the other hand, it's a big opportunity for her. If Landrieu blunders, or if Terrell comes off as equally capable, her campaign will get a big boost. Terrell doesn't have to do better, but only hold her own to gain ground.

It appears to me that no one comes closer to sorting out the meaning of the latest Arab terrorist murders in Israel than the DEBKAfile Web site. Today's posting is "Secret Fatah-Hizballah alliance manifested in Hebron."

National Review writer John Miller has an interesting column in this morning's New York Times. Miller attributes the victory of Tim Johnson in the South Dakota senate race to the 3,000 votes siphoned from John Thune by the libertarian party candidate. I'm not sure what I think about the thesis generally--was Ralph Nader the cause of Al Gore's defeat?--but the column is worth reading: "A third party on the right." (Thanks to our reader G. Chimes or G.C. Himes for pointing the column out.)

Following up on Rocket Man's clinical demolition of Minnesota's angry humorist, the unfunny one, we proudly present Charles Krauthammer's "The Fantasy Life of American Liberals."

Also worthy of your attention this morning is a column that appeared earlier this week on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and is now available on its OpinionJournal Web site, Fouad Ajami's "Two faces, one terror."

In the wake of the most recent terrorist threats, England is beginning a public education campaign on how to survive biological or chemical attack.

I read Garrison Keillor's response to his Republican critics in Salon earlier today, but found it too appalling for immediate comment. Having thought about it for a while, I can only say that Keillor has gone around the bend. He begins his rebuttal by denouncing Norm Coleman as "truly evil," "cheap and cynical and unpatriotic," an "empty suit." What was the transgression that prompted this vicious denunciation? Coleman, during the Senate campaign, "came within an inch of accusing Wellstone of being an agent of al-Qaida." Only Coleman didn't. As any Minnesotan can attest, Coleman ran a dignified and principled campaign. (The mud that was slung in that campaign was slung mainly by Wellstone.) If Coleman had said or implied that Wellstone was an agent of al-Qaida, Keillor no doubt would have told us when and how Coleman did so. But Coleman didn't, and Keillor doesn't pretend to have any evidence to back up his slur. Coleman disagreed with Wellstone on the Iraq resolution, to be sure. Wellstone's pacifism in the face of the terrorist attack on America was at odds with the views of most Minnesotans, and, had he not been killed in a tragic plane crash, would have cost him the election. But to suggest that Coleman accused Wellstone of being unpatriotic is absurd. Note, however, the irony that Keillor--a famous ironist--explicitly accuses Coleman of being "unpatriotic." For liberals these days, there is no such thing as a disagreement over policy. But from that very low point, Keillor goes farther downhill. Coleman is a "son of a bitch," a "cynic," "evil," "offensive to our national memory and obscenely evil." Keillor descends deeper and deeper: "I personally don't believe he had anything to do with the crash of Paul's plane. Plenty of people suspect he did. I don't." And then Keillor, who has never been big on self-awareness, seems to look into a mirror: "All you had to do was look at Coleman's face, that weird smile, the anger in the forehead. Or see how poorly his L.A. wife played the part of Mrs. Coleman, posing for pictures with him, standing apart, stiff, angry." Well, someone is angry here, but it isn't Norm or Laurie Coleman. And speaking of weird smiles with anger in the forehead, check out the picture of Keillor that accompanies the Slate article. Keillor concludes his piece by putting himself in the shoes of God: "To gain the whole world and lose your own soul is not a course that Scripture recommends....God has a way of returning and straightening those things out. Sinner beware." If Pat Robertson wrote something this over the top, it would be front page news. In the end, Keillor has located himself somewhere in Chomskyland: the domain of the mentally ill. In the aftermath of the election, a lot of masks have fallen from the faces of prominent liberals, revealing something beneath that is not pretty. Not pretty at all. But I think the general public is getting a clear view of where the hate, the anger and the irrationality reside.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: Until Rocket Man steps up to the plate, I highly recommend blogger Mitch Berg's serial lutefisking of the unfunny one on his site, "Shot in the Dark."

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried a "reported" editorial on the South Dakota senate race. The conclusion is inescapable that John Thune won it. The Journal's editorial is "The Oglala Sioux's Senator." Today's Wall Street Journal carries Daniel Henninger's brilliant column: "Democrats need to rejoin America."

Friends and readers: Thanks for your messages regarding our erroneous links to the Onion and to MEMRI in the posts below; each has now been fixed (I think). In addition to the MEMRI report on the subject of the disgusting Egyptian television series, Debka also carries an informative column: "Saudi Hand Behind Egypt's Anti-Jewish TV Series." If you have any influence with our State Department, please ask the department to check these items out.

Speaking of the Jerusalem Post, here's Bret Stephens' take on the implications of the U.N. Iraq resolution. Stephens, a favorite here at Power Line, thinks that the resolution lowers the likelihood of U.S. military action. Stephens also speculates about the war against Israel that likely would be triggered if the U.S. attacks Iraq, as well as other implications for the region.

The Washington Post denounces the Egyptian government for promoting "galloping Anti-Semitism" through the airing of the TV series "Horseman Without A Horse." The Egyptian government censors Egyptian television, so the airing of the show is not the by-product of free speech. The Post declares that "thanks in large part to Cairo's propangandists, fundamental hatred of Jews, as opposed to opposition to Israeli poliicies, is playing a growing role in mainstream Arab policies." So even the Post has finally noticed. But what about our State Department? As I noted a few days ago, according to the Jerusalem Post the State Department has said that the first six episodes of the lengthy series are free of anti-Semitism. Yet, as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows in this report, there can be no dispute that the show is anti-Semitic. Indeed, the producer of the show (having returned from observing Iraqi elections) boasts that he is exposing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a libelous forgery used by the Russian government as a pretext for persecuting Jews) as the basis of Zionism. So why would it be relevant if the first six episodes happen not to contain anti-Semitic content? Perhaps the key can be found in the Washington Post editorial. It urges the administration to cut back, if not cut off, foreign aid to Egypt, and suggests that Congress become involved if necessary. Is the State Department, which initially asked Egypt not to permit the broadcast, now attempting to cover-up Egyptian anti-Semitism in order to protect Egypt's $2 billion a year subsidy?

Federal authorities have announced that they captured a top al Qaeda operative within "the past week or so." The terrorist's name was not released, but he was described as one of the top two-dozen al Qaeda leaders. I don't suppose this is related to Tom Daschle's whining about lack of progress in the war yesterday, but it might be; it wouldn't be a bad tactic to stockpile good news on captured or killed terrorists to be released at helpful times.

The Republicans might have won the election, but the Associated Press still knows who the good guys are. Check out this AP report, featuring a photo of Tom Daschle and Joe Lieberman arriving at a news conference. Note the AP's neutral, factual characterization of the Democrats' position on the homeland security bill: "They want to amend the House-passed bill establishing a new Cabinet-level Homeland Security Department to eliminate a provision favoring special interests." Oh. I guess that settles that.

Andrew Sullivan pointed us to this Onion parody, which I think is hilarious. The headline: "Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered By Stereotypes."

Al Gore has just come out in favor of a Canadian-style, "single payer" health care system. This is the same Al Gore who, if I recall correctly, bashed Bill Bradley for favoring such a system during the 2000 presidential primaries. Gore clearly doesn't want anyone serious to be on his left during the 2004 presidential primaries. As David Frum notes in this piece from National Review Online, the Canadian system is wildly unpopular here (voters in liberal Oregon have just rejected it) and properly so. As Frum, a Canadian, puts it, "Canada has the best health care system on earth -- so long as you don't get sick." But Gore, I think, realizes that he can only defeat President Bush if (a) he gets the nomination from his leftward-turning party and (b) things really go to hell, in which case no one will hold his support for "single payer" against him.

More from Minnesota's Angry Humorist: We ain't willing to pay to see the rest of the unfunny one's latest ravings, but we're willing to look at the stuff for entertainment value if it's free: "Minnesota's shame." He may not be funny, but hey, he's been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books; he's very well read, it's well known.

Here is, I think, a profoundly stupid headline from a column in Long Island's liberal Newsday: "Significance of Pelosi's Gender is Getting Lost." The column decries the fact that the reaction to Pelosi's selection as minority leader has focused on the fact that she is a "San Francisco Democrat" rather than on her gender. This would seem to me to be a good thing. Curiously, the author, Marie Cocco, derides "Republican spinners" for pigeonholing Pelosi as a liberal. Yet Cocco acknowledges that "The nation has voted above all, for a muscular military and foreign policy that Pelosi herself stood against when she voted against authorizing war in Iraq." But, hey, so what? The important thing is she's a woman.

National Review Online has just posted Victor Davis Hanson's new column, great as always: "Our Gordian Knot."

The Washington Post reports that security officials in Europe are even more explicit than the FBI in warning of the possibility of major terrorist attacks in the near future. The primary focus of concern appears to be chemical and biological weapons; a Jordanian al Qaeda leader named Abu Zarqawi was singled out as especially dangerous. He apparently specializes in chemican and biological weapons and is suspected to be in the act of organizing attacks in western Europe. Interpol reports that "All intelligence experts are agreed that al Qaeda is preparing a major terrorist operation, simultaneous attacks that would not target the United States alone but several countries at the same time."

Charles Krauthammer on the U.N. resolution. Krauthammer isn't pleased that we've gone along with the inspections regime, although he is confident that President Bush ultimately will do what is necessary, and even sees possible strategic advantages (along with the potential disadvantages) in proceeding as we are. Krauthammer's best line: "Does [Hans Blix] want to go home to Sweden as the man who blew the whistle that triggered the invasion of Iraq? Perhaps the United States should promise him asylum."

Friends and readers: Many of you no doubt noticed that, through no fault of our own, Power Line had a serious outage if not a near-death experience yesterday. My theory is that, like Tinkerbell's legions, you wished us back to life. Rocket Man advises me, however, that the Blogger folks actually responded to our 911 call at noon yesterday within eight hours or so. In any event, we're grateful to be back in business, and grateful that you stuck with us. If anything, because of upgraded software support, the site will be better than ever.

The London Times, in "al Qaeda Resurgent," editorializes intelligently about the significance of the alleged bin Laden audiotape and the continuing challenges facing the effort to eradicate the terrorist group--not least, the difficulty of cutting off the flow of funds to al Qaeda.

More on the Louisiana Senate race from the Washington Times. Governor Foster, who had threatened to back Mary Landrieu, has now come out for Suzanne Terrell because he "feels an obligation to support the President." Think maybe he got a call from the White House? Other Republicans are also falling into line, and a new Terrell ad is running statewide. This is going to be a race. If I am not mistaken, Louisiana has never in its history elected a Republican to the Senate. If Terrell, with very little experience and no unusual appeal, breaks that record, it will be another indication that most of what passed for conventional wisdom pre-September 11 is now obsolete.

Rocket Man is right about the ambiguity as to what the MVP award is supposed to mean. The term "valuable" can be seen as implying some penalty for playing on a poor team, I suppose. But A-Rod was so much better than anyone else this year that the penalty would have to be out-and-out disqualification for him not to be the MVP, in my view. In the old days, when batting average was regarded as the key statistic, I don't think anyone would have awarded the MVP to a candidate whose batting average was less than five-sixths of his rival's (say .250 as opposed to .300), unless other key statistics strongly favored that candidate. Today slugging percentage has replaced batting average, and Tejada's slugging percentage was less than five-sixths that of Rodriguez. And Rodriguez was also clearly superior in on-base percentage and runs produced.

But getting back to the ambiguity that Rocket Man noted, I find it signifcant that when fans and sportswriters discuss past MVP awards they tend to assume that the award was given to the best player. For example, fans and writers will note Barry Bonds' award count in trying to show that Bonds is better than Hank Aaron and Willie Mays were. No one goes back to check how, say, the 1959 pennant race played out in order to determine whether Aaron and Mays lost the award because their teams didn't do well enough (they did not lose it for that reason; in 1959, the MVP was shortstop Ernie Banks of the lowly Cubs, the A-Rod of his day but not as good; Banks also won it in 1958 -- modern sportswriters indulge themselves more than their predecessors did in denying the award to the best player). Thus, since the MVP honor quite naturally will be viewed in retrospect as indicating who the best player was, perhaps it would be best to award it on that basis.

Here's the Washington Post's take on the Louisiana Senate race (thanks to my daughter for pointing me to it). The Post suggests that Landrieu is in "the fight of her life." (What about her initial Senate race, which she won, or stole, by a razor thin margin?). It notes that voting in Democratic strongholds, and especially among African-Americans, was very light last week. The Post expects turnout to be even lower in the run-off, and it notes that the Republicans are still "flush with cash from the general election." The Republicans plan to use the same strategy that worked for Saxby Chambliss in Georgia -- essentially attacking her for not supporting President Bush on homeland security and tax cuts. Chambliss closed a gap comparable to the one some polls say Landrieu's opponent, Suzanne Haik Terrell, now faces. On the other hand, Terrell is no Chambliss from what I can tell. And the Post notes that prominent Louisiana Republicans, including the governor, are refusing to endorse her. In short, Landrieu looks to be the clear favorite, but the race still seems worth watching.

Before signing off for the night, I can't resist noting one more indication of the collapse of intelligent liberalism in America: PETA protesters storming the stage at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in New York, earlier tonight:

And just on principle, in hopes of annoying any PETA members who may accidentally stumble across this site--we would never do this just to pander for more hits, of course--here are the Victoria's Secret models on the runway at the start of the show:

Scott Ritter, who has made a lucrative career out of his formerly-obscure position as a U.N. weapons inspector, sounds off again. Ritter's faith in Saddam Hussein and inspections is touching, sort of, but a little hard to make any sense of. He says that war is now inevitable: "We're going to war, and there's not a damn thing the inspectors can do to stop it...." This is "a shame," because "inspections worked once and they can work again." We'll, let's consider that. However well inspections may or may not have been working up until 1998, they certainly stopped working at that point because Saddam kicked out the inspectors, including Ritter. Saddam was able to do this because there was no credible threat of force backing up the inspection regime. So for the last four years, inspections have certainly not been "working," since they haven't taken place. Now inspections will be resumed. Why? Because of President Bush's credible threat of force. Inspections may or may not work now, but if they do, it will be because President Bush forced Saddam's hand, not because of ineffectual wailing by left-wingers like Ritter--who, for all of his professed devotion to inspections, was completely silent about their four-year cessation, and began his public complaints only when President Bush started pressing for their resumption. Whose side, exactly, is he on?

A number of readers emailed us to say that the link to Ted Rall's post-election cartoon was defective. We've fixed the link in yesterday's post, and here it is again. Just another indication of the seriousness and intellectual integrity of today's left.

I haven't yet weighed in on the baseball discussion from early--very early--this morning. Here are my opinions, for what they are worth: 1) Doug Mientkiewicz is by far the best fielding first baseman in baseball. Giving John Olerud the Gold Glove is a travesty. 2) As to the MVP award, I think there has always been ambiguity about what the award represents. In some sports, there is a "Player of the Year" award. So designated, I think everyone understands that the award goes to the player who has the best year, regardless of whether his team is good enough to win a title. In baseball, the "most valuable" designation has always inhabited an uneasy middle ground in which there is an implication that to be most valuable, a player must have helped his team to win (or at least come close to) a pennant. Thus, for example, Steve Carlton didn't win the MVP in 1972 even though he was clearly the outstanding player that year. Alex Rodriguez may be in the same category this year. It seems to me that baseball needs to decide whether its MVP award is the same as, or different from, a Player of the Year Award. If it is different, someone should figure out how and to what extent a team's performance factors in. If it is the same, A-Rod should win it.

More commentary on the Democrats' swerve to the left, this time from the Washington Post. Here is the Post's take on events: "A decade after Bill Clinton pushed his party toward the center of American politics, inspiring a vibrant movement of 'New Democrat' followers in Congress, a liberal resurgence is sweeping the party, threatening to brush centrists to the side." Pinch me, I think I'm dreaming. Revisionist history: the problem with McGovern and Dukakis is that they just weren't quite liberal enough; same with Gephardt and Daschle. The most interesting thing about the article is the tone taken by the Post--definitely critical of the leftward trend, and giving more than equal time to "centrist" critics.

Ann Coulter's latest includes the fact that newly-elected House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was one of twelve Representatives who voted to revoke the Boy Scouts' 84-year old federal charter two years ago. The Democrats seem to be driving off a cliff.

Tom Daschle appears to have been unhinged by last week's defeat. Today he petulantly complained that "We can't find bin Laden, we haven't made real progress in finding key elements of al Qaeda. They continue to be as great a threat today as they were one and a half years ago. So by what measure can we claim to be successful so far?" I think most Americans understand that: 1) The reason why al Qaeda is a threat today is that for eight years the Clinton administration did nothing to combat the terrorist network; they even refused to take bin Laden prisoner when he was offered to us by the government of Sudan. 2) Tom Daschle has done absolutely nothing to help in the war against terrorism, either before or after Sept. 11, nor will he do anything in the future. On the contrary, he hopes the war will go poorly, which he believes will advance his own political career. 3) Great progress has been made by the U.S. Army and our security agencies in fighting al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the U.S., Afghanistan, the Philippines and around the world. No thanks to Tom Daschle. The Democrats in general, and Daschle in particular, appear to be taking to heart the theory that they need to oppose President Bush more vigorously and distinguish themselves more clearly from the Republicans. We have expressed our views on this theory in a number of posts in recent days.

Reader Greg Nesmith of Baton Rouge thinks we were too quick to write off the Republican's chances in the Louisiana runoff election. He points out that in the poll cited by Real Clear Politics, Mary Landrieu's lead over Suzanne Terrell is only seven points among likely voters. I still have some reservations based on Terrell's inexperience and divisions within the Louisiana GOP, but President Bush will visit Louisiana at least once and maybe twice before the December 7 election, and he is extremely popular in Louisiana, so anything might happen. We hope Greg will keep us advised of events on the ground in Louisiana between now and then; we will pass on any intelligence we receive.

The effects of last week's election are already being felt in the Senate. Today the Senate Judiciary Committee forwarded two nominees--including the Rocket Prof's friend Michael McConnell--to the Senate floor on a voice vote. Prior to the election, both nominations had been blocked from obtaining a hearing by the one-vote Democrat majority on the Judiciary Committee.

The Washington Post reports that the State Department failed to obtain a warrant for the arrest of John Muhammad after a State Department employee in Antigua reported to her superiors that she suspected Muhammad of having committed a crime by giving her a forged birth certificate. According to the Post, if the State Department had obtained a warrant for his arrest, Muhammad would have been detained when he tried to return to the United States and would have faced a federal charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Thus, his Washington D.C. shooting spree probably would not have occurred. Meanwhile, Joel Mowbray of National Review Online reports that Senate Democrats are fighting for the confirmation of Maura Harty as head of the Consular Affairs office at the State Department. And, according to Mowbray, the Republicans may go along with it. Ms. Harty helped formulate the "Visa Express" program which let in three of the September 11 terrorists. She also was in charge of dealing with overseas abductions of American children and incurred the wrath of the parents of victims through what the parent of two girls kidnapped in Saudi Arabia calls "indifference bordering on hostility to the interests of American parents." Mowbray makes a convincing case that Harty is part of the State Department's "courtesy culture" that has given rise to the gaping holes in our border security. Such as the one John Muhammad crawled through when the State Department didn't see fit to follow up on the suspicions of its employee in Antigua.

Norm Coleman seems to be undertaking his senatorial responsibities in the same spirit that led him to appoint as his deputy mayor a Democratic former St. Paul city councilman who made the surgical commitment to femininity as a full-fledged member of the "transgender community": "Coleman to champion Wellstone proposals." Say it ain't so, Norm!

Unlike Republicans, Democrats always stay in character. This morning's Star Tribune suggests that Senator Wellstone's death will almost certainly give rise to the perfect union of the Wellstones and the trial lawyers: "Ciresi's law firm looking into Wellstone crash." Hey, Norm, take a lesson!

The Minnesota Twins' first baseman is Doug M., the best defensive first baseman I have ever seen. Is it possible there is another player who saves more outs at his position than M. has the past couple years? In his first full season with the Twins he won a gold glove for his defensive play, and I believe he had just as good a season in the field this past year, although his offensive production suffered. In the gold glove balloting, he was edged this year by Seattle's John Olerud: Here's the report from this morning's Star Tribune: "Twins: Hunter wins another Gold Glove, but not Mientkiewicz." Is this some kind of a joke?

George Will brings a historian's understanding to the November 5 results, and a psychiatrist's understanding to the emotions roiling inside the liberal breast. It's not pretty, but it's edifying, and it's a great reminder that we need to be protected from these folks: "The party of recycling."

It's one of those silly sports arguments that may be too subjective to resolve. Should baseball's Most Valuable Player (MVP) award go to the best player in the league even if his team has a poor year? This report from ESPN shows that, in the minds of those who vote on the award, the answer is "no." Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers was clearly the best player in the American League this year. An outstanding fielder at the key defensive position of shortstop, he put up wonderful offensive numbers. Yet because his team finished in last place, he finished a distant second in the MVP voting to Miguel Tejada of the highly successful (but not champion) Oakland A's. Tejada is also a fine fielding shortstop, but his offensive production falls far short of A-Rod's. The numbers I look at most closely are Slugging Percentage and On-Base Percentage. Rodriguez's numbers are .623 and .392 respectively. Tejada's are .508 and .354. Runs produced (RBI plus runs scored) is also considered a significant statistic, and it favors players like Tejada, who play for top teams. Yet Rodriguez "produced" 267 runs, compared to 239 for Tejada. But the A's won 103 games and the Rangers won only 72.

So who should be the MVP? As I suggested, this is a somewhat silly debate, but one that many fans can't resist. I come down firmly on A-Rod's side. To me, a player's value is measured by the extent to which he causes his team to score runs and stops opponents from doing the same. Studies demostrates what is obvious -- causing your team to score runs and the other team not to score them translates pretty straightforwardly into creating victories for your team, which is what every player is there to do. It is clear to me that Rodriguez created a significantly larger run surplus for his team this year than Tejada did for his, and thus created more wins.

The typical response is to note that Texas could have finished last without Rodriguez (although with fewer victories), whereas Oakland could not have edged out the Angels for first place in their division without Tejada. But, because of the closeness of the race in the AL West, there are probably half a dozen or more Oakland players of whom this can be said. Are they all more valuable than A-Rod? Moreover, the 1927 Yankess were so good that they probably could have won the pennant without Babe Ruth. Did that make him less "valuable" than Paul Waner, without whom the Pirates could not have won the National League pennant that same year? In the end, I think sportswriters should stick to identifying and rewarding excellence and not concern themselves with what might have occurred in counter-factual situations. They seem to have enough difficulty doing the former.

Thomas Sowell offers the Republicans good advice on how they can appeal to minority voters. His logic is so compelling--minority voters should be receptive to conservative ideas because they usually cannot insulate themselves from the ill effects of liberal policies--that one can only wonder why Republicans have not already made more inroads.

The one and only Real Clear Politics has the first post-November 5 poll in Louisiana; it shows Mary Landrieu with a 15 point lead. No hope for the GOP in this one, I'm afraid.

More liberal hate: OK, I know Ted Rall is too easy a target, but here is his post-election cartoon. Just another indication of how far the left is from being serious about anything.

Income inequality is a topic that we have devoted considerable attention to; note the article linked on the left. Our article treats the topic from a number of perspectives, but most fundamentally, we think that in the contemporary American context, at least, "income inequality" is a very good thing. In fact, it is another word for opportunity. This is, however, not the conventional view, so I groaned when I saw this headline in the Jerusalem Post: "A cure for income inequality." The article itself, however, is a very pleasant surprise. Check it out. Here is the conclusion: "The key to equity--ethnic and otherwise--is to democratize economic opportunity by shrinking government to spur economic growth." There is hope for Israel's economy after all.

Our reader Dick Benesh has thoughtfully forwarded an on-the-scene report provided by the "alternative" Minneapolis weekly City Pages of the DFL election eve party last week. Courtesy of the City Pages account, you can almost feel the gloom descending. Dick regrets he wasn't there to enjoy it. Submitted for your consideration, an article that brings new meaning to the term Schadenfreude: "Wasn't that a party."

Key quote: "On election night the Democratic Party--in characteristic ass-backward fashion--wound up holding its wake for Paul Wellstone a week after the funeral. The evening made for grim spectacle almost from the beginning. By 9:30 there was a palpable sense of dread in the room, accompanied by a pervasive reek from what I hoped was neglected cheese trays." On second thought, maybe Dick's better off having enjoyed the party vicariously.

As expected, Iraq has replied to the United Nations' ultimatum by agreeing to the return of weapons inspectors. The full text of the Iraqi letter to the Secretary General is available here. The letter is long, rambling, abusive and incoherent. It begins like this:

"You may recall the huge clamor fabricated by the President of the United States administration, in the biggest and most wicked slander against Iraq, supported in malicious intent, and spearheaded in word and malevolence, by his lackey Tony Blair..." and goes on in similar style for a number of pages.

The two portions of the letter containing the commitment to permit the return of the inspectors are gothic in tone and hedged with apparent qualifiers:

"Dealing with the inspectors, the government of Iraq will also take into consideration their way of conduct, the intentions of those who are ill-intentioned among them and their improper approach in showing respect to the people's national dignity, their independence and security, and their country's security, independence and sovereignty. We are eager to see them perform their duties in accordance with the international law as soon as possible. If they do so, professionally, and lawfully, without any premeditated intentions, the liar's lies will be exposed to public opinion and the declared objective of the Security Council will be achieved."

And this: "We hereby inform you that we will deal with resolution 1441, despite its bad contents, if it is to be implemented according to the premeditated evil of the parties of ill-intent, the important thing in this is trying to spare our people from harm. But we will not forget, nor should others do, that safeguarding our people's dignity, security, independence, and protecting our country, its sovereignty and sublime values, is as sacred a duty in our leadership's and government's agenda. Therefore, and as we said in the foresaid agreement and press statement, we are prepared to receive the inspectors, so that they can carry out their duties, and make sure that Iraq has not developed weapons of mass destruction during their absence since 1998."

The overall impression created by Iraq's letter is that the inmates are firmly in control of the asylum. Now begins a dance of obfuscation which, despite its deadly seriousness, will frequently be characterized by low comedy.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist, and Much More: Hugh Hewitt's latest WorldNetDaily column picks up on the unfunny one, and other cranky liberals: "The graceless aging of Donahue, Moyers and Keillor."

Hot off the press, courtesy of a reader: John Thune has announced that he will not seek a recount. So Johnson's victory stands. Of course, if the South Dakota voters had known Dashcle and Johnson were destined to be in the minority, Thune would have won easily.

South Dakota update: A reader has informed us that the canvass process that is automatically triggered in a close election is now complete, and John Thune gained four votes through the canvass. Thune's campaign told our reader that they have not yet decided whether to pursue a recount.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the suspect in Sunday night's massacre at an Israeli kibbutz is Sirhan Sirhan, thought to be a distant cousin of the Palenstinian who assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968. The original Sirhan Sirhan was motivated by RFK's support of Israel. The current terrorist is believed to be named in honor of his illustrious cousin.

We at Power Line can't get enough of Mark Steyn. Here, from The Spectator is more from Steyn on last week's elections. On the Maryland gubernatorial race: "Kennedy-wise, the torch hasn't passed to a new generation; it's been all but extinguished." On the Wellstone death rally: "To those watching at home, it looked like hidden-camera footage from a inside a particularly insane cult." And, "the Minnesota memorial gave us the religious Left: they don't believe in God, they believe in politics: the Democratic party is their church, Wellstone their latest martyr, and the campaign a crusade. They couldn't have been any freakier if they'd been speaking in tongues." Thanks to reader Joshua Sharf for calling this one to my attention.

Yes, Rocket Man, I recalled our blog on the then-upcoming Egyptian series. Every indication was that it would be grossly anti-Semitic. What I wanted to suggest last night was that, now that the show is actually airing, and the Egyptian government has gone on record as saying it isn't anti-Semitic, and the State Department has vouched for six episodes, the competing claims about the show can be tested. If, as seems likely, the Egyptian government and the State Department are dissembling, they can be exposed.

The Washington Times reports that federal authorities are investigating whether John Muhammad and John Malvo were members of a radical Muslim sect called Jamaat al-Fuqra, which has been responsible for numerous murders and firebombings. The most intriguing aspect of this possible connection is that the group owns a commune in Red House, Virginia, just thirty miles south of Lynchburg. The FBI is investigating whether Muhammad and Malvo used the Red House commune as a hideout during their murder spree.

Steve Sailer is a paragon of political incorrectness and a formidable analyst of electoral demographics. Here's his final take on the results of November 5: "Whites, not Latinos, win for GOP."

Michael Kelly thinks the Democrats have come to believe their own malarkey. Unlike many liberals, Kelly can accurately observe the evidence before his eyes and seems to have a great deal of fun describing it in "The democratic mistake."

Our faithful reader Peter Swanson is no fan of racial profiling--he joins us in disputing whether it exists where it is usually alleged to exist--but Peter has detected what he believes to be a bona fide example of racial profiling via this WorldNetDaily column: "Chief Moose cost lives."

No one has better defense and intelligence sources than the reporters at the Washington Times, so Rowan Scarborough's story this morning reads like a genuine preview of coming attractions: "War plan calls for air strikes."

It would seem impossible to make us any happier that Norm Coleman pulled out his race against Walter Mondale, but this morning's paper did it. Mondale's mad dash for cash is spelled out in detail in this fascinating story from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, featuring every one of the usual suspects--Terry McAuliffe, Deacon's partner Vernon Jordan, Steven Spielberg and the Hollywood gang, Hillary Clinton, and the trial lawyers at Minneapolis's Robins Kaplan firm. The story is "Mondale raised millions in days."

Preliminary indications from U.S. officials are that the bin Laden audio tape is authentic. If so, contrary to the position I have long taken, he isn't dead after all. Time will tell, but if the voice is bin Laden's, my view that he was killed in December of last year will be proved wrong. That would be too bad, but on the positive side, it would provide a real incentive for American troops to hunt him down and kill him.

It appears that President Bush's homeland security bill will pass, maybe as soon as tomorrow. As reported in the Washington Post, the current bill is virtually identical to what the Administration had previously proposed. It is being supported by three "centrist" Senators, one Republican and two Democrats. The bill also includes authorization for commercial airline pilots to be armed. The American Federation of Government Employees didn't like the bill, a good sign.

Wait a minute, Deacon--this is the Egyptian TV series we blogged on several weeks ago, which is based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"--to suggest that this is not anti-Semitic is absurd, as the original descriptions of the series made clear. The State Department has reviewed, apparently, six out of forty-one episodes, but it strains credulity to claim that so far, they are free of anti-Jewish sentiment. Maybe last week's election returns will embolden the Administration to clean house at the State Department. Having said that, I confess that I have no idea how feasible it is to throw out entrenched Foggy Bottom bureaucrats. This is a civil service issue, I guess, so for the foreseeable future the State Department will probably continue to be an embarrassment.

Deacon, according to the weekly Forward, "Riding an Electoral Wave, GOP Jews Say Their Time Has Come." On that happy note, I say good night.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Egyptian government has assured the U.S. State Department that there is no anti-Semitic content in a 41-part series that the Anti-Defamation League has described as "a very troubling manifestation of anti-Jewish incitement." Moreover, the State Department itself reportedly found no anti-Semitic material in the first six episodes of the series. I do not know at this time whether the Egyptian representations are truthful and whether the State Department's conclusion is reasonable. One would like, at least, to credit our own government. However, Trunk's reporting on past State Department cover-ups on behalf of Arafat invites skepticism. This story may be worth keeping an eye on.

Several readers have gently told me that I need not be alarmed about the U.N. resolution. They assure me that Presdent Bush ultimately will do what is necessary in Iraq. Some suggest that he is actually "playing" the U.N. I agree that, far more likely than not, President Bush will do what needs to be done regardless of the outcome of the "process" the U.N. has established. What bothers me is that we have already given France, Russia, et al. more say about how things will be than we should have. Left to our own devices, I don't believe we'd be going through the inspections drill again. So we may spend the next few months advancing the U.N.'s agenda, not our own. I find this disturbing, even if everything comes out right in the end. I've also been concerned that, at the end of the process, our actions may well be less popular at home than if we had not undertaken the latest inspection regime. If Hans Blix can't find a clear violation, or pretends that he can't, the case for action may seem less compelling to some of our citizens than it does now. I recognize, however, that there are scenarios under which doing the inspection dance could make our subsequent action more popular. I'm not astute enough to figure out how this aspect will play out. So, I guess my real objection is to the principle of the thing.

We are huge fans and admirers of Ben Stein for many reasons. The more I learn about him, and the more I read his stuff, the more I like him. I sincerely wish I had been able to avail myself of his current advice regarding "how to ruin your life" when it could have done me some good. Through sheer good luck I have come across the University of Wisconsin Daily Cardinal's account of Stein's speech before an audience of 2,000 students (!) in Madison last night: "Ben Stein wins audience." Don't miss it!

The photo below is of Gennifer Flowers, taken in 1994 when she was reprising Marilyn Monroe's "Happy birthday Mr. President" shtick for a comedy TV show. Ms. Flowers is newsworthy because a federal appellate court has just reinstated her defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopolous and James Carville. They claimed that she doctored the audiotapes she made of her telephone conversations with Bill Clinton. She obviously didn't--Clinton apologized to Mario Cuomo for calling him a "mafiosi" on one of her recordings--but it's much too late to matter...on the other hand, can you think of three people you'd more like to see lose a defamation case than Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopolous and James Carville? I'd take that one for free. But as the Trunk and Deacon already know, I'm really posting on this so I can repeat one of my favorite lines of all time: Gennifer Flowers on a TV interview show, during her 1992 travails, saying: "Whoever it was who said, 'You will know the truth and the truth will make you free,' was full of s***." Um, I believe that was Jesus. You can take the girl out of Sunday School, but you can't take the Sunday School out of the girl. Not entirely, anyway. Congratulations, Gennifer, and good luck.

Thanks for posting the full poll results, Rocket Man. If the voters are having second thoughts about handing control to the Republicans, they're doing a good job of concealing them. Your theory on why the Republican numbers are so high right now has merit too, it seems to me. I've always thought that the Republicans would profit from running advertisements on selected issues during periods when there are no races in progress. Sometimes "special interest groups" will take care of this. Recall the devastating ad campaign against "Clinton Care." But this is the exception. Obviously, when it comes to the Party footing the bill, the costs are so high that it will always seem that the resources are better husbanded for the high election season. But suppose, hypothetically, that the Democratic stall tactics on homeland security had occurred in 2001 instead of 2002. Since the media was not about to cover this in an informative matter, wouldn't it have been worthwhile, at both a moral and a political level, to call this to the attention of the American people through advertising? Parties can be defined during non-election years too. President Bush defined himself in 2001 under circumstances when the media had no choice but to allow the American people to notice. Under more normal circumstances, "off-year defining" will not be free, but may be worth the cost.

By the way, here is one theory on why the Republicans' numbers are so high right now. For the last two months, Americans have been watching and listening to commercials in which Republican candidates directly communicate their own views. This is a departure from the normal practice, when voters learn about Republicans only through the mediation of Democratic reporters, editors, TV news people, etc. When people actually hear from Republicans, they tend to respond positively. This explains why Democrats are so enthusiastic about campaign finance "reform:" Republicans, unlike Democrats, have to pay for the ability to compete with the mainstream media.

Deacon cited some of the data from the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in his post earlier today, but the poll results are worth viewing in full. The poll was taken in the days immediately following the election, so there may be an element of after-glow, but the results are horrific for the Democrats. Here are just a few highlights:

President Bush's job approval is back up to 68%.
The Republican Party has a 54% favorable, 38% unfavorable rating, compared to the Democrats' 48%/42%.
By a 50%/42% margin, the Republicans do have a clear plan for solving the country's problems; by a 30%/60% margin, the Democrats do not have a clear plan.
By a 53%/40% margin, Americans think it is a good thing for the economy that the Republicans control both the Presidency and Congress.
60% of Democrats say the Democrats in Congress should support President Bush either more than they have so far (22%) or the same as they have been ( 38%). Only 37% of Democrats say they should oppose him more.
And finally: nothwithstanding approximately twelve million Democratic scare commercials, by a 57% to 40% margin, Americans favor reforming Social Security to allow workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts--a percentage that was not even dented by the campaign. And 64% support, while only 29% oppose, making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Yikes. The Democrats had better hope those numbers are transitory.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist, and Much More: Our friend and faithful reader Bruce Sanborn is the chairman of the Claremont Institute. Bruce's post-election recap on the results in Minnesota is hot off the press.

In his piece, Bruce surveys the Minnesota landscape and finds three notable winners from last week's results: George W. Bush, the Taxpayers' League, and our friend Brian Sullivan. Bruce also takes note of one conspicuous loser, the angry humorist to whom he alludes in the title of his terrific piece: "Woebegone in Minnesota?"

We never miss the weekly New York Post column of the incomparable Daniel Pipes. Today's is "Profs who hate America."

We have some catching up to do with our Mark Steyn columns. Here's his latest, out this morning: "Remembrance Day in Trudeaupia."

Byron York of National Review Online on new polls that show "widespread repudiation of the [Democrats'] approach to terrorism, and virtually everything else." According to the numbers York cites, 64 percent of the public said that the Republicans are tough enough on terrorism, while 27 percent said they aren't tough enough. But only 34 percent said the Democrats are tough enough, while 57 percent said they aren't sufficiently tough. Other results are also discouraging for the Democrats, but for the foreseeable future, it's the terrorism numbers they will have to reverse in order to get back into the game. As I have suggested, this is a difficult mission, should they choose to accept it. The Democrats' jockeying on national security issues this year has created an impression that may be almost as lasting as the opposite impression President Bush created in the weeks after September 11.

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard gives his take on Bill Moyers' temper tantrum. Hayes no longer thinks that Moyers should be evicted from Public Television. Instead, he thinks Moyers should have a daily show. "The tragedy of Bill Moyers is that very few people watch him these days. Nothing would be more helpful to the 'right-wingers' Moyers so despises than to give him a bigger platform."

We had somehow missed the latest from our favorite, Mark Steyn: "Dubya does it his way."

Speaking of Garrison Keillor's bizarre attack on Norm Coleman--that is to say, while we're on the subject of bitter, washed-up lefties about whose opinion on one gives a damn--here is the piece by Bill Moyers on PBS that has been roundly condemned in conservative circles. To me, the most striking thing about both articles is the sheer, malignant hatred that shines through in each. Moyers at least purports to deal with public policy rather than character assassination, but his assertions are even wackier than Keillor's. According to Moyers, the President's "right wing agenda" includes "using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich." Huh? What in the world is he talking about? I guess he means not transferring as much wealth from "the rich" (an epithet that generally refers to hard-working people) to "working people" (a euphemism that frequently refers to non-working people) as he would prefer. Likewise, the "agenda" includes "giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment..." The evidence for which he doesn't bother to mention. "And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture." For those who may not keep up with these matters, the "Rapture" is, in some of the less orthodox Protestant theologies, an aspect of the Second Coming of Christ. In the context of the Bush Administration, however, what on God's green earth is he talking about? It is deeply depressing that this is what liberalism has come to. Moyers was once considered an intellectual; Keillor was once considered a humorist. Now they are embarrassing has-beens--which, however, does not make them ineligible for continued receipt of your tax dollars. Let's see--Moyers is rich, and I'm not.....Maybe if Moyers were booted off PBS, he would be happy that the taxing power is no longer being misused to transfer wealth from hard-working people like me to rich people like him. Let's give it a try.

HonestReporting.com identifies the latest outrages in media coverage of Israel. For example, Time Magazine featured as one of its cartoons of the week a drawing from the Daytona Beach News entitled "Which Nukes Are You Most Afraid Of?" The candidates were North Korea, Iran, Iraq, al Qaeda, and Israel. And Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported without critical comment the libelous and wholly fictitious claim of a Saudi deputy minister of education that Israeli math textbooks include questions such as, if you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next, what is the total. HonestReporting also reprints an article by Alan Dershowitz in the National Post of Canada denouncing the mounting efforts on college campuses to treat Israel as a pariah state. Dershowitz is no hero at Power Line, but this piece is worth reading.

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard believes that, appearances to the contrary, the Democrats will not "jump off the cliff" by embracing Nancy Pelosi style San Francisco liberalism. Brooks expects Democrats to try and gain some credibility on national defense and offer a tax cut program that focuses on payroll taxes. The first point is the key. As Brooks says, as long as voters don't trust Democrats to be tough on terrorism, it doesn't matter what the party says about anything else. I agree with Brooks that many Democrats recognize this, but this trust will have to be earned, and I'm not sure the Democrats are up to it.

Michelle Malkin on the refusal of the mainstream media to cover the Wichita Massacre, a crime spree by two black males that ended in the execution style murders of four white victims. By contrast, Malkin notes that comparable savagery against politically correct victims -- for example, the horrific James Byrd dragging case in Texas and the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming -- garners front-page headlines and continuous media coverage.

Today, while driving home through the Baltimore area, I caught some election commentary on WBAL, an all-news radio station. According to the WBAL news folks, citing exit polls, Republican Bob Ehrlich captured 50 percent of the Jewish vote in the Baltimore area, and between 35 and 40 percent statewide. Three possible reasons were offered for Ehrlich's strong showing among Jews in the Baltimore area: his support of Israel, his support of school choice (this played well with the fairly substantial Orthodox community), and some local flap that I didn't really understand. There was also speculation that Ehrlich prospered with voters generally as a result of Maryland's equivalent of the Wellstone death rally, namely the Townsend debate rally. This occurred when Ehrlich debated Townsend at predominantly black Morgan State University in an event sponsored by the NAACP. It was their only debate, and I thought when he agreed to the debate that it was a mistake on Ehrlich's part to debate on what likely would be hostile terrain. In fact, the audience was hostile to Ehrlich, passed oreo cookies around to ridicule his black running mate, and Townsend carried the crowd with a rousing defense of affirmative action. Although the big newspapers all said Townsend won the debate hands-down, it is now thought that the debate rally didn't play very well with the television audience. It is pleasant to think that Democrats are losing not only on the merits but because they simply can't behave themselves.

More on Minnesota's Angry Humorist: The New York Post's Page Six column calls him an effete egghead, but that doesn't quite capture it. (Thanks to Mrs. Rocket Man for pointing out the item to us.) Here's the Page Six item on the unfunny one:

"Being a losing leftist in Minnesota has Garrison Keillor gnashing his teeth in impotent rage. After Norm Coleman soundly trounced Walter Mondale in the U.S. Senate race, Keillor launched a limp attack on the senator-elect on salon.com. Recalling a dinner party in St. Paul at which then-mayor Coleman gave a speech about native son F. Scott Fitzgerald, Keillor snipes, '[It] was soon clear to anyone who has ever graded ninth-grade book reports that the mayor had never read Fitzgerald,' reports the Washington Post."

Faithful readers of the Power Line know that as a teen-ager I studied poltitical philosophy at the feet of the master, Bob Dylan. In his great song "Ballad of a Thin Man," Dylan snarled the following lines as the ultimate condemnation of a pretentious know-nothing. It never seemed like quite so perfect a put-down until now:

"You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?"

Debate has long raged among Dylanologists regarding the identity of Dylan's "Mister Jones." Now we know.

We haven't posted on the Bali bombing lately, but the authorities in Indonesia appear to be doing a good job of rolling up the murderers. As expected, the plot centered on Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir. Check out this account in the Sydney Morning Herald. So far, viewed simply as criminal conspirators, the Islamofascists haven't been particularly competent.

Our fellow Claremont fellow Mackubin Thomas Owens is a great American, a Vietnam vet, a former Marine platoon leader, and current professor of strategy at the Naval War College. His "Nothing Sweeter: Reflections on Veterans Day, 2002" provides the kind of tribute to those who have served that we want to pay today. Please do take a look.

Dean Barkley was appointed by Jesse Ventura to serve the unexpired portion of Paul Wellstone's term. Initially, Ventura leaned toward appointing another Democrat, but after the Wellstone pep rally (at which he was booed), Ventura announced his intention to appoint someone from his Independence Party. Barkley is one of a handful of actual members of that party. Today, he announced that he will remain independent and not caucus with either party. The practical effect of this is that Daschle will remain in control of the Senate's agenda during the lame-duck session. Barkley can't be blamed for maintaining his independent status, but I'll predict that he will vote with the Democrats. In Minnesota, at least, if you scratch an independent you nearly always find a Democrat.

Here is a report on the latest outrage by Arab terrorists in Israel. A terrorist attacked a kibbutz and killed five people before escaping; the dead include a mother and her two sons, aged four and five, to whom she was reading a bedtime story when the attacker burst in and shot them all. The kibbutz is described as "dovish;" its members are supporters of a Palestinian state who were proud of their "good relations" with the Arabs.

More good news from Georgia, as the realignment continues.

Let's hear it for Romania. (Thanks to James Taranto.) The political and cultural variety of Europe raise again the question why anyone would take seriously the right of France or Russia to veto our (and presumably anyone else's) foreign policy.

Forgive us for blowing our own horn this morning, but our friends at the invaluable RealClearPolitics site have run my post-election retrospective on the Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll: "The Trouble with the Star Trib Poll." In my original draft of the piece, I thought I was being clever when I titled it "A Study in Scarlet (Faces)." But, in truth, although I think they should, I don't think the folks at the Strib do in fact feel embarrassed.

National Review Online now features David Frum's Diary. In his most recent entry, Frum detects a pattern that applies to President Bush's foreign policy moves:

Step 1: Bush threatens to go it alone.
Step 2: Liberals and foreign allies holler.
Step 3: Threatened with irrelevance, Congress/the UN/the Arab
League/the IMF offers to do 80% of what Bush wants.
Step 4: Bush reluctantly agrees to work with Congress/the UN/the
Arab League/the IMF.
Step 5: Admiring articles about Colin Powell appear in the New
York Times.
Step 6: Conservatives panic.
Step 7: Bush does precisely what he intended to do from the very
beginning.

The Jerusalem Post reports that European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten has turned down a request by a European legislator to investigate whether "European aid to the Palestinians, currently running at 10 million euros a month, is being diverted to fund terrorist activity." Patten said that he wants this issue investigated "like a hole in the head."

The Trunk talked about the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll in one of his posts today, but he modestly refrained from pointing out that he has dissected that poll and exposed its shortcomings in a series of posts on this site over the last several weeks. The Strib's poll, which does not follow conventional polling procedures but instead relies on a secret formula to slice and dice the data it collects, has been consistently wrong over a period of years. It has a horrible record, if we assume that its purposes are to accurately reflect the state of the electorate and to predict the outcome of elections. Yet despite its repeated failures, the Strib's poll has not reformed its methods. It continues to crank out "data" that exaggerate the extent of Democratic support in every race, by a margin of five or more percentage points. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Strib does not intend its poll to be accurate, but rather intends it to support the Democratic Party. If the Strib does not reform its methods in the wake of this year's debacle, that conclusion will be inescapable.

Before we move on from post-election commentary, there is one question I am curious about: Where is Mark Dayton? I don't mean this in a figurative sense. I actually am wondering about his physical whereabouts. Dayton was elected to the Senate two years ago, mainly on the basis of his immense personal fortune. He has not distinguished himself in any way, either before or after his election. But he is, after all, a United States Senator. One would normally expect him to be in evidence during an election, even though he is not running this year--stumping for other candidates, giving interviews to the press, appearing at rallies, whatever. Yet this year, Dayton has been completely AWOL. To my knowledge, he has made no public appearances during this election season. He never appeared with Paul Wellstone or, later, with Walter Mondale. He did not attend Wellstone's memorial service. I heard that this was because he was in Europe, but what in the world was he doing in Europe in October and November of an election year? And why didn't he return for the service? Since the election, Dayton's silence has continued; maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen him quoted anywhere. Dayton is such a cipher that, I am embarrassed to admit, I hadn't even noticed his absence until I heard a caller on a local radio show ask where he was and why he hadn't been seen in public since the last legislative session ended. Maybe this is all just an indication of what a marginal player Dayton is, but I suspect there may be something stranger behind it.

One of the least edifying forms of post-election commentary is the predictable flurry of articles on the theme that George Bush isn't dumb after all. This is the third or fourth time we have seen a round of articles about what a mistake it is to underestimate Bush because, contrary to popular belief, he really isn't stupid. This specimen from the Washington Post is typical. Even though I've linked to it, I don't particularly recommend that you read it, since it says nothing new and this whole subject is a bore. "Dumb" is not really a meaningful concept in American politics; it is merely an epithet that Democrats call Republicans. Lincoln, the first Republican President, was widely regarded as a moron. Democratic newspapers depicted him as a gorilla with his knuckles scraping the ground. They apparently failed to notice that Lincoln was one of the most brilliant men who have ever participated in public life in this or any other country. Lincoln was only the beginning. Grant, one of the great military geniuses of world history, was dumb. Coolidge was dumb. Eisenhower, who organized the grandest and most complicated endeavor in human history, the re-conquest of Western Europe, was dumb. Ronald Reagan, the most important and most successful President of the 20th century, was dumb. Dan Quayle is dumb; a liberal joked that Quayle--a graduate of college and law school, a Congressman and Senator who at the time was the Vice-President of the United States--thought they spoke Latin in Latin America, and liberal reporters repeated the yarn as fact, apparently without noticing its utter absurdity. Now George Bush is dumb. All I can say is, welcome to the club. I don't know why it is that Republicans never seem to label Democrats as "dumb," even when the term would seem to apply. Based on academic performance, Ted Kennedy and Al Gore are dumb. Robert Byrd is an idiot, as far as I can tell. Mark Dayton--about whom more later--is utterly without mental talent. But for whatever reason, Republicans don't seem to think that calling their opponents "dumb" is particularly helpful. It's just as well, as American voters have demonstrated a commendable indifference to this particular form of attack. As of today, President Bush bestrides the earth (or globe? I forget) like a colossus, but I'm sure that next time he scores another stunning victory, we'll be reading more articles that tell us, breathlessly, that he isn't so dumb after all.

Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution provides the liberal perspective on the U.N. resolution on Iraq. Essentially, he is delighted because he thinks, as I do, that with the inspection regime in place Bush will either not go to war or will go to war with less support than he otherwise would have had. Here's O'Hanlon's key sentence is: "Once they begin, successful inspections will develop a momentum of their own -- especially if they can provide good assurances that Iraq's nuclear program, the hardest to hide from inspectors, has been arrested." Apparently, O'Hanlon believes that inspections can be "successful" whether or not they provide good assurances that Iraq's nuclear program has been arrested. For liberals like O'Hanlon, the important thing is that the inspection "process" (or in other contexts, the "peace process") takes on a life of its own and becomes a substitute for action. Whether or not the process actually accomplishes its stated purpose is secondary.

Matt Drudge linked to this Time article about a poll by former Clinton pollster Mark Penn which suggests that the Wellstone pep rally hurt Democrats not only in Minnesota, but nationally. Penn found that 68% of voters knew about the memorial service, and a remarkable 67% of independents said it made them less likely to vote for a Democrat. Even more important, however, is that 65% of respondents said that the Democrats have not been supportive enough of the war on terror. So much for the theory, apparently prevalent among Democrats and their supporters, that they lost because they failed to take on President Bush aggressively enough.

I had missed the column by the great Mark Steyn with his take on the election: "The Dems are looking like Wile E. Coyote." Great quote: "If Bush is too dumb to be President, how dumb do you have to be to be consistently outwitted by him?"

I caught the column this morning thanks to the excellent Ashbrook Center blog "No Left Turns," a blog that features the commentary of several of our Claremont-related friends such as Steve Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan.

This morning's Pioneer Press carries a retrospective on the Mondale/Coleman and Minnesota gubernatorial races that is also worth reading: "Poll shows independents tipped scales to GOP."

William Tucker is a smart guy and a good writer. I always learn something from reading his pieces. This morning's New York Post carries his excellent column, "What Dems don't get."

In the column, Tucker recounts how he used to be a liberal Democrat until he learned from observations involving his own personal experience. Conservatives generally seem to be capable of learning something valuable from their own lives and from the evidence before their eyes. My paradigm example is Ronald Reagan, a former liberal Democrat who learned a thing or two about Communism grappling with Communists in hand to hand combat as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Similarly, George W. Bush seems to have learned something important personally from overcoming the temptations of alcohol. More important, he seems to have learned something politically from observing the multi-dimensional political success of Ronald Reagan.

Contrast these examples with Walter Mondale. Here's a guy who has spent a life at the furthest reaches of American politics, and yet seems to have learned literally nothing from the experience. To hear him talk, the catastrophes of the Carter years hit like plagues sent from heaven, having nothing to do with the policies of his own administration.

The relentless liberal condescension first to Reagan and now to Bush seems to me to represent the opposite of the truth. Reagan and Bush share a kind of genius for absorbing the lessons of their experience. Liberals, on the other hand, do not seem to have the ability to learn anything from their own errors.

Eric Black writes the Star Tribune's long post-election recap on the Mondale/Coleman race. The story is interesting and done well. It seems to me that Black makes a good faith effort to get it right. The details of which I have some knowledge, such as the Saturday meeting between Mondale and his brain trust in which the decision to run was made, are right.

It is not clear to me how a bit political player like David Lillehaug always manages to make himself a protagonist in stories like this. The guy has a genius for self-promotion that is beyond belief. In this story he appears by the third paragraph, and his debate memorandum to Mondale is quoted about halfway through the story. No one appears to be claiming credit for advising Mondale to call Coleman "Norman" during the debate. In any event, the story is worth reading:"13 Days: Behind the scenes of Minnesot'a historic election."

This morning's Star Tribune also reports the results of a Minnesota Poll taken November 6-8: "Once strongly pro-DFL, Minnesota sliding to right." The poll results are contained in a graphic in PDF format that you can download by clicking on the small graphic in the text of the story.

The text of the story has the following key paragraph: "The poll confirmed the shift toward the GOP detected by the Star Tribune's tracking polls in the days just before the election. Forty-four percent of voters identified themselves as Republicans, 41 percent said they were DFLers and 15 percent called themselves independents -- a smaller number than in past elections." I do not recall any hint of such "tracking polls" previously appearing in the Star Tribune. Moreover, the story makes no attempt to reconcile the post-election poll with every pre-election Minnesota Poll that the paper did report.

You might say that the Star Tribune alludes to what I believe were the inaccuracies of its Minnesota Poll by reprinting a story from last week's Wall Street Journal: "Why some pollsters got it so wrong on election day." That story has the following account of the doings in Minnesota: "The Minnesota Senate race, rocked by the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone, was the scene of one of the most striking polling disparities of all. On Nov. 3, two days before the election, the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll showed former Vice President Walter Mondale leading Republican Norm Coleman by 46 to 41 percent. The same day, a St. Paul Pioneer Press survey conducted by Mason-Dixon showed a nearly perfect reverse image: Coleman 47 percent, Mondale 41 percent.

"Factoring in the margin of error for each poll, both surveys showed a race too close to call, says Lawrence Jacobs, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Yet they left opposing impressions about the contest, which Coleman won by 3 percentage points.

"(The Star Tribune Minnesota Poll continued interviewing on Sunday and Monday before the election. It found a highly volatile electorate in the race. The Sunday and Monday polling found an electorate evenly split between Mondale and Coleman.)

"Mondale campaign spokesman Jim Farrell says the fast-moving swirl of emotion after Wellstone's death, a much-politicized memorial service and an election-eve debate made polling difficult."

The parenthetical sentences in the penultimate paragraph above are the Star Tribune's insert into the Wall Street Journal story. We apparently are not going to get a more extensive explanation from the paper about the discrepancy between the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll's final published pre-election results and the electoral outcome.

Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan on the U.N. Trap. As Kristol and Kagan demonstrate, "the inspections process on which we are to embark is a trap. It may well be one that this powerful and determined president can get out of, but it is a trap nonetheless." Under the U.N. Resolution, President Bush is obliged to participate in another U.N. debate before he uses troops. Thus, France has succeeded in getting the "two-step" process it demanded all along. Ultimately, Bush can go ahead and invade Iraq without the blessing of the Security Council, but he has always been free to do this. As Kristol and Kagan suggest, after dancing with the U.N. this long, it may be more difficult for Bush to ignore the U.N. down the road than it would have been to ignore it earlier on. Suppose Saddam does a little dancing too, and is able to provide enough access to satisfy Hans Blix (who doesn't want a war any more than his Security Council backers do) without enabling the inspectors to find a smoking gun. Under these circumstances, won't Bush face more substantial resistance to using force to effectuate regime change than if he had just proceeded with the invasion straight away? Kristol and Kagan remain confident that, at the appropriate time, President Bush will "thank the U.N. and our 'allies' for their efforts, and order his military to get about the urgent business of removing Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq." I share their confidence. But it would have been better to retain control of our foreign policy all along than to cede control to France, Russia, and Hans Blix, only to take it back after months of delay, assuming that we do.

Speaking of the Jerusalem Post, Deacon, you won't see many American newspapers giving President Bush his due any time soon, but here is the Post's editorial titled "A Stunning Display of Leadership". That pretty well sums it up.

The excellent Bret Stephens of the Jerusalem Post on the U.S. elections and the wrong-headedness of campaign finance reform efforts.

The controversy over leaked photos of terrorists being transported on board a C-130 by American troops is covered by the Washington Post. The pictures, apparently taken by an American serviceman on board the flight, were sent to radio talk show host Art Bell, who posted them on his website. The pictures are disturbing, and the government is apparently not happy with their disclosure. On the whole, however, I think it may be good for images like these to be circulated, especially in the Arab world. The rise of Islamofascism has been fueled by a spirit of triumphalism resulting from the U.S. government's feeble response to terrorist attacks after 1992. While most Americans were barely aware of al Qaeda and similar organizations and paid little attention to their attacks, the Islamists thought they were winning what to them was an all-out war. As a supplement to America's current strong military response to terrorism, images of terrorists being defeated and humiliated should help deflate the Islamofascists and cause potential supporters to melt away. It is success that breeds enthusiasm, not failure. And in this war, crudeness is no liability. Remember that the terrorists use video footage of the decapitation of Daniel Pearl as a recruiting tool. One of the bootlegged photos is shown below.

We are late getting on to the story of the execrable Garrison Keillor and his hysterical jeremiad on Minnesota's election of Norm Coleman to the United States Senate (Mrs. Rocket Man has sicced us on it). Keillor calls his piece "Empty victory for a hollow man."

Blogger Mitch Berg has written an open letter to Keillor that he has posted on his terrific site, "A Shot in the Dark." Here's an excerpt from Mitch's eloquent open letter:

"Baby-boomers, at least those who spend their declining years pining for Camelot, caterwaul endlessly about wanting to find 'joy' and 'heroism' in politics. And yet, how could one look further than Norm Coleman, the most joyfully political man in Minnesota politics today? The man who was...well, not heroic, but certainly above-and-beyond the call in the way he revitalized St. Paul. Not that that wasn't without problems - we're on the hook for the Excel Energy Center, and I really detest subsidizing pro sports. But he did a fabulous job - not that fellow St. Paulite Keillor would admit it.

"Beyond that, though - we don't need joy or heroism in the Senate - because that means people are having too much fun doing that job, or that there are crises that must be solved. Do the job. Keep things out of trouble. Then go home. That's all I ask.

"And that's why we benighted slobs elected the apparently soulless, joyless bag of skin, Norm Coleman, over the joy-sotted Walter Mondale."

Someone really needs to write an essay on the degeneration of humor in the hands of liberal moralists like Keillor. We reserve our thoughts on that subject for another day.

The always-fascinating Debka File writes that American, British and Iranian special forces have been battling Iraqi troops for the last two weeks in southeastern Iraq. Debka File says the plan is for the allied troops to complete the encirclement of Iraq's southern oilfields within sixty days, so that by the time the new inspection team submits its report, the US-led forces will be in position to seize the Khozistan oilfields immediately. This mirrors the situation already established in the north, according to Debka File. If this analysis is correct, President Bush's strategy is to be poised to move decisively against Saddam Hussein the moment the inspectors report lack of compliance with the latest U.N. resolution. Seizure of both the northern and southern oilfields will inevitably, the thinking is said to go, lead to the downfall of Saddam. Maybe, but my guess is that the Administration will not wait for a coup, and that part of the plan will be to move directly against Saddam with lightning speed. I think the campaign will be stunningly swift. Is anyone betting against President Bush these days? Not me. Debka File says that Saddam has sought to slow down the American advance and make aerial observation more difficult by setting fire to the southeastern Iraqi marshes, which, I take it, contain plenty of oil. The photo below shows the burning marshes.

With the election over, a principal focus of this blog will again be the war against the Islamofascists. Yesterday Ronald Noble, the head of Interpol, warned that

"All intelligence experts are agreed that al Qaeda is preparing a major terrorist operation, simultaneous attacks that would not target the United States alone but several countries at the same time.

"The field of battle now stretches to all countries and mobilises several terrorist groups."

Noble also said that he believes Osama bin Laden is alive. He offered no particular evidence to support this conclusion; of course, that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have any.

Thomas Sowell on what happens now that the Republicans control the Senate. Noting that no president can fight, much less win, every battle, Sowell identifies the ones he considers most important. The courts are at the top of his list, along with national security issues, because of the influence they exert on such key matters as immigration and racial quotas.

The Pioneer Press has more on the Sara Jane Olson plea deal: "Olson, SLA peers met deadline." And more on the Rick Kahn eulogy: "Wellstone eulogizer has no regrets." Given the inconsistencies in, and the implausibility of, Kahn's comments, my favorite part of the Pioneer Press story is this: "Kahn did not return calls from the Pioneer Press."

Studies in liberal governance: In Minnesota, a convicted sex offender who serves a short prison sentence and repeatedly violates the terms of his probation gets to take advantage of his freedom to ruin another woman's life (his first conviction was for criminal sexual conduct with a 14-year-old girl). The details in the Star Tribune story tell you just about everything you need to know about Minnesota's criminal justice system: "Fugitive charged with Eagan rape eludes capture."

Rick Kahn speaks: You know, the guy who made Norm Coleman our senator. Is delusion a river in Egypt? Does "eulogy" mean never having to say you're sorry? According to the Star Tribune story this morning, "Rick Kahn says his eulogy was from the heart." From my heart: Thanks, Rick.

Here is a report from National Review Online about the passage of the U.N. resolution on Iraq. The report predicts that Iraq will quickly frustrate inspectors so obviously that the U.S. and Britain will attack Iraq within a few months, after brief discussions with the Security Council. Things could certainly play out that way. However, it is also possible, as the report acknowledges, that Iraq will string the U.N. along for a while and that, once that charade is finished, the U.S. will become bogged down in more wrangling at the U.N. I continue to believe that it was a mistake for President Bush to have taken the U.N. this seriously and to have done so much dancing with France.

Professor Robert George of Princeton also believes that, for Senate Republicans, this is "no time for magnanimity," either when it comes to judicial nominees or to the legislative agenda that Republicans campaigned on this year. George argues persuasively that President Bush should revive the nomination of Judge Priscilla Owen whose nomination was killed by Democrats solely because she did not tow the liberal line on abortion. Not surprisingly, George offers far better counsel than the Washington Post (see below) when he concludes "there should be no compromising to appease left-wing Democrats. What we should do, rather, is learn from them. They are not timid about exercising political power when they come into possession of it. Nor should Republicans be."

The Washington Post urges President Bush to seek an accord with Senate Democrats regarding judicial nominations. Specifically, it urges Bush to (1) continue to push for procedural reforms that will speed up the process by which nominees receive consideration and (2) refrain from simply pushing as many conservatives as possible through the Senate. Bush should, indeed, enact procedural reforms. However, he should also make up for lost time and seek the confirmation of judges who share his conservative judicial philosophy. He should do this because it is his duty to nominate judges who share his view of the Constitution and because such judges are especially needed after nearly eight years of non-stop liberal appointments (the Republicans didn't start saying "no" until near the end of the Clinton presidency). The Post suggests that unless Bush reaches out to the Democrats now, they will thwart his nominees if they recapture the Senate two or four years from now. But it offers no reason to believe that the Democrats won't do this in any event. In fact, although the Post does not acknowledge it, Bush actually nominated some non-conservatives after he was elected in order to present a somewhat balanced slate of nominees to the Senate. The Democrats responded by confirming the moderates and mostly blocking the conservatives. The Post concludes by urging both sides to think about "what kind of nominees everyone could regard as above political dispute." As I have argued before, the answer among those who are sufficiently engaged to merit consideration for the bench is, essentially, the non-existent kind.

As a teen-ager, I studied political philosophy at the feet of Bob Dylan. You know, "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"--the mock-Woody Guthrie stuff for which Dylan himself rapidly lost the taste. When he did so, he wrote a brilliant kissoff to the folk/protest movement called "Restless Farewell." It took me a little longer than Dylan to figure out how lame this stuff was, but by the time Dylan-clone Phil Ochs committed suicide in a funk over the Vietnam War, I think I was beginning to get on to it.

In any event, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal must have had a misspent youth a little like mine. In his weekly Journal column this morning he manages to cast his interpretation of Tuesday's electoral results into the lyrics of Dylan songs. Referring to the famous blue/red (Democrat/Republican) electoral map that depicted the 2000 election, Henninger all but sings: "It's all over now, baby blue."

When I saw the headline that Sara Olson/Kathy Soliah had pleaded guilty to murder in the Sacramento bank case, along with three of her fellow gang members, I was stunned. The fact that justice could be done so long after the fact, in the face of obvious obstacles and widespread indifference, is a tribute to dedicated, tenacious law enforcement. Now here is an almost equally surprising headline: the last remaining SLA member, James Kilgore, has been captured in a "luxury suburb" of Cape Town, South Africa, where he was teaching at a university under an alias. Once again, we take our hats off to the Los Angeles and Sacramento police departments and the FBI for refusing to forget the murders and other mayhem committed by this criminal gang.

Rocket Man has also hit it out of the park in his blog below. The party out of power always faces a tough decision about whether to present the voters with "an echo or a choice," as Barry Goldwater once put it. In terms of presidential politics, a centrist candidate may be more electable in theory. However, in practice presidential races are usually determined almost entirely by the popularity of the incumbent. Thus, if you are a liberal or a conservative, it probably makes sense to run a strong liberal or conservative against the incumbent or his would-be successor on the theory that if the president is unpopular you can elect the person you want and if the president is popular you can't elect anyone. In 1980, for example, the first George Bush might have run better against Carter than Reagan did, but Reagan was certainly electable, easily as it turned out. However, there are elections when the incumbent is "borderline popular." In that case, there is a risk associated with running a strong liberal or conservative. In 2000, anyone more conservative than Bush would probably have lost, and indeed Bush nearly lost, whereas the more liberal McCain might well have won fairly comfortably. When it comes to congressional races, going strong liberal or strong conservative on a national basis when the president is popular carries a huge risk. Losing the presidency is losing the presidency whether or not the election is close. But landslide losses in the presidential race usually have devastating implications for the make-up of Congress. Landslide victims of the past 40 years -- Mondale, McGovern, and Goldwater himself -- all provided a choice rather than an echo.

Victor Davis Hanson hits another one out of the park in this piece about "the bankruptcy of the anti-Americanists." Hanson shows how the stance of the dissident left in the present war with the Islamofascists has proven that the these folks were never opposed to fascism, much less in favor of democracy abroad, but instead are simply "deductive anti-Americanists" motivated only a "a strange desire to vent displeasure with our own culture." Hanson also believes that "the Democrats' failure to condemn loudly and publicly the ravings of the lunatic left" is part of the explanation for this week's election results.

The post mortems on the election are mostly in, and a clear majority of Democrats are attributing their losses to a failure to attack President Bush aggressively enough and to distinguish themselves sufficiently from the Republicans. With only a few exceptions, the mainstream press is reporting this assessment with approval. The conventional view was neatly summed up this morning in a cartoon in the Anchorage Daily News--unfortunately not available online--that depicted a saloon with noisily celebrating elephants; two dejected donkeys sit at a table drinking "GOP Lite" beer, and one of them says, "I think I'm ready for something stronger." Almost entirely absent from the "mainstream" commentary is any acknowledgement that most Americans like President Bush and his policies, and many were put off by the Democrats' attacks on him, or that many Americans were repelled by the obstructionist tactics of Daschle, Leahy et al. in the Senate. It is interesting that whenever Republicans lose, the diagnosis in the mainstream press is that they lost because they were too "extreme" and need to move toward the center, i.e., become more like Democrats. (Never mind that in the days when Republicans were nearly indistinguishable from Democrats, they appeared to be on the road to extinction.) I'm not sure I've ever seen a mainstream press account suggesting that Republicans lost because they didn't attack the Democrats hard enough or distinguish themselves sufficiently from Democratic policies. So: When Republicans lose, the moral is that they need to be more like Democrats; when Democrats lose, the moral is that they need to be less like Republicans.

Al-Qaeda comes to St. Paul: And thank God, the cable guy noticed. The Star Tribune has a terrific story in this morning's paper: "Drugs-for-missile suspect raised suspicions in St. Paul."

Charles Krauthammer's weekly column this morning expresses a devastating assessment of the Democratic Party based only partly on Tuesday's election results. According to Krauthammer, "The message of the 2002 election is that the Democrats remain brain-dead, and that ideas -- lack of ideas -- have consequences." His concluding observations pay tribute to President Bush, and suggest that the American people have taken his measure. The column is "The Uses of Political Courage."

I don't understand where on the political spectrum Michal Lind is nowadays, but he is a very smart guy, with a Deacon-like knowledge of American history. The Financial Times carries his evaluation of Tuesday's election results, and it is worth reading. With thanks to our friends at RealClearPolitics for bringing it to our attention, the column is "The Emerging Democratic Minority."

Here's a Washington Post story about Maryland's Lieutenant Governor-elect Michael Steele, my former law firm colleague and Maryland's first elected black state official. The article doesn't mention it, but Steele's sister, a medical doctor, happens to be the former wife of Iron Mike Tyson. The Post reports that the Ehrlich-Steele ticket got about 13 percent of the African-American vote. That's more than the pre-election polls showed, but only marginally better than the rate of black support for Republican gubernatorial candidates in the recent past. As I speculated a few days ago, however, Steele may have helped Ehrlich by making him appear moderate to white voters. Here, the Washington Post reports that Ehrlich received two-thirds of the votes cast by white "moderates," and that's what decided the election. Overall, the final vote was 51 percent for Ehrlich and 48 percent for Townsend.

Last night, I posted a piece by Sam Schulman on the Jewish vote that Mrs. Trunk was kind enough to call to our attention. I suggested that Jews should abandon the Democratic Party, rather than trying to influence it, because anti-Semitic elements in the Party would inevitably become too powerful to counteract. Perhaps the best evidence for my premise can be found in a piece I posted over the weekend by two leading Democratic Congressmen, Martin Frost (Jewish) and John Lewis (African-American). In that piece, Frost subscribed to view that Jews, in effect, would simply have to get used to African-Americans supporting the Palestinian cause. Since the Democratic Party needs the African-American vote more than it needs the Jewish vote, one can ultimately substitute the phrase "Democratic Party" for "African-Americans" in Frost's warning. Indeed, as Schulman points out, we got a glimpse of the future during the Clinton years, when successive Israeli governments were pressured by the U.S. to make concessions to the Palestinians even in the face of repeated PLO violations of the Oslo accords and escalating violence against Israel.

Of course, Jews are concerned about domestic issues too. But unless one is a socialist or a trial lawyer, the Democrats have little to offer Jews on the domestic front, other than higher taxes and affirmative action programs that discriminate against Jews (and other whites) on the basis of their skin color. This is not a Party with a soul worth fighting over.

The Star Tribune's account of Sara Jane Olson's plea deal has more details than the AP story and is also worth reading. The story is "Sara Jane Olson pleads guilty to murder." Here's the beauty part: "'I never entered that bank with the intent of harming anyone,' Olson testified during a hearing Thursday in Superior Court in Sacramento, Calif. 'I am truly sorry, and I will be sorry until the day I die.'"

See, she only meant to rob the bank. She only carried her own carbine for show. And her colleague wasn't supposed to fire the hair trigger shotgun that blew Mrs. Opsahl away. Olson's lawyer has nevertheless undoubtedly explained to her the difficulties presented by the felony murder doctrine. The former Emily Harris (now Emily Montague) was the person who pulled the trigger, and also, like Olson, expresses great remorse over the murder. On the day of the shooting, however, she advised Olson and her SLA colleagues that Mrs. Opsahl was a "bourgeois pig." (The plea agreement stipulates to every relevant fact described in Patricia Hearst's account of the robbery and murder.) By the way, the robbery in which Mrs. Opsahl was murdered netted $15,000.

The remorse expressed by the SLA crowd at the plea hearing will undoubtedly come as something of a surprise to the Opsahl family. They haven't heard from any of the SLA folks in the 25 years or so since Mrs. Opsahl was murdered. And one of this disgusting crew beat the rap when he was charged and tried a few years back, a time when their expressions of remorse might have actually meant something.

Trunk, your distinction between Luther's tactics and those of the Democrats and Republicans in 1884 is well taken. I think that the Republicans helped cobble together the Peoples' Party from the old Greenback Party and some labor elements, but it was a bona fide party and Butler was a legitimate, if highly eccentric, candidate. Meanwhile, Bob McCarthy, a reader who lives in Kline's district, suggests that half of the vote for Garst (the fake candidate) may have come from potential Luther voters. Mr. McCarthy has liberal friends who were outraged by Luther's actions but couldn't bring themselves to vote for Kline, "so they decided to vote for the very candidate Luther had created." I'm a stranger in these parts, so I can't comment on Mr. McCarthy's theory, but it seemed interesting enough to pass along.

The shocking headline on the AP wire story posted on the Pioneer Press Web site says it all: "Olson, 3 other ex-SLA members, to plead guilty to murder."

To expand on the headline a little, St. Paul's own terrorist--Sara Jane Olson, f/k/a Kathleen Soliah--has agreed to plead guilty to the murder of Myrna Opsahl in the course of the robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Sacramento in 1975, along with her three other Symbionese Liberation Army colleagues who are also in custody.

Rocket Man and I wrote about Olson's local supporters in the piece "Kathy's Clowns" that is linked over on the left under our publications. Rocket Man appeared on a local television public affairs show discussing her apprehension and participation in the various offenses that led to her apprehension.

Olson's incarceration for her plea on the original attempted bombing charge in Los Angeles and her pending plea on the murder charge in Sacramento bring a measure of justice to the family of Myrna Opsahl, a measure of justice that has been resisted vociferously by Olson's leftist friends and colleagues in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.

Her conviction in Los Angeles and her pending conviction in Sacramento are almost entirely attributable to the unbelievably dogged legal work of Los Angeles County Assistant District Attorney Michael Lattin. We have previously conveyed to him personally our sincere gratitude and admiration for his outstanding work; he played an invaluable role in bringing both of these difficult cases to a successful resolution.

Deacon's post below provides the kind of historical perspective that makes us proud. But the examples cited really only highlight the unique depths to which Bill Luther sank in his desperate efforts to hold onto his office. With Luther's connivance, Sam Garst filed as a candidate of a non-existent party: the "No New Taxes" party. And Garst himself was a Democratic activist in the tax-and-spend mold. Literally everything about his candidacy was fraudulent, simply intended to drain votes from John Kline under false pretenses.

The television advertisements that Luther ran the weekend before the election were designed to complement the fraudulent Garst candidacy by asserting that John Kline was in favor of a new tax, a national sales tax. Right through the final day of the campaign, Luther was trying to drain votes from Kline and drive them to the fraudulent Garst candidacy through the use of that advertisement.

By contrast, Benjamin Butler and John St. John were legitimate candidates and the Peoples' Party and the Prohibition Party were bona fide parties. Let's give Luther his due: his campaign hit a new kind of rock bottom in American politics.

More on the South Dakota Senate race from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Republican John Thune has said it is not likely that he will ask for a recount, but he is "not totally ruling out any option." Thune plans to "follow the process, check the math, and make sure all the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted, so that we're sure there were no irregularities." One irregularity that apparently will not be challenged is that some polling places in Todd and Mellette counties "mistakenly opened an hour early" and remained open until the usual 7 p.m. closing time, meaning that they were open one hour longer than the rest of the polls. According to the Argus Leader, Todd County "is the Rosebud Indian Reservation" and "is predominantly Democrat," while Mellette County is "split between Republicans and Democrats." Reader Cory Skluzak notes that Mellette County's is 52% Indian and also contains parts of the Rosebud Reservation.

Yesterday morning, I suggested that the Democrats would overreact to their electoral defeat and adopt a more explicitly leftist and virulently anti-Bush posture, probably to their detriment. National Review's Dinesh D'Souza offers some amusing suggestions for how the Democrats might accomplish this. Meanwhile, on the same National Review Online page, Rod Dreher reports that we may get an early glimpse of this strategy in Louisiana, of all places. According to Dreher, Mary Landrieu is planning to discard her Bush-friendly moderate persona in her run-off election. Supposedly, she is preparing to run as a "Bush-bashing old-style Democrat" in order to energize her black supporters. I'm certainly not qualified to second-guess Mary Landrieu and her family when it comes to Louisiana politics, but Presdent Bush is quite popular in Louisiana. I tend to agree with Dreher that Landrieu's proposed strategy sounds like a political "Hail Mary."

You know, Trunk, Luther's trick was used in 19th century presidential elections. In the election of 1884 between Grover Cleveland and James Blaine, the Republicans (it was widely believed) subsidized the thrid-party campaign of Peoples' Party candidate Benjamin Butler, in order to take the populist vote away from the more conservative Cleveland. And the Democrats are believed to have subsidized fourth party candidate John St. John, the Prohibition Party candidate, so that Cleveland would suffer less from the anti "rum" vote. This tactic was considered dirty even in the rough-and-tumble politics of that era.

And finally, I want to note that despite John Kline's victory on Tuesday, Bill Luther's dirty trick worked--sort of. Luther's campaign coordinated with a Democratic activist named Sam Garth, who filed in Luther's district under the banner of the fictitious "No New Taxes" party. The obvious intent was to drain conservative support away from Kline's campaign. The tactic was denounced by every newspaper in the Twin Cities and in Luther's district, and the issue kept Luther on the defensive throughout the campaign. Nevertheless, for three or four days prior to the election, Luther blanketed the airways with a television ad that began, "Are you ready for a new tax?" It went on to quote Kline commenting favorably on the concept of a national sales tax--but without noting that the national sales tax (which is not part of Kline's platform in any case) is envisioned as a substitute for the income tax. On Tuesday, Sam Garst and the No New Taxes party drew the votes of a clueless 4.3% of the voters who had somehow missed the entire controversy, but were likely influenced by Luther's ad. If the race had been as close as Luther and Kline's two prior races, that 4.3% would have swung the election to Luther. Thus, Luther's dirty trick worked, in a sense; of course, the controversy cost him many votes and probably accounts for a good part of Kline's margin.

I have long had high regard for Tim Pawlenty, the governor-elect of Minnesota. This campaign, however, gave him a broader stage and the opportunity to fully display his political talents. He performed brilliantly. Pawlenty is an extremely able lawyer, legislator and administrator. We now see that in addition, he is a politician of tremendous talent. His victory speech Tuesday night and press conference Wednesday morning were broadcast nationally; both performances were superb. At only 41 years old, I think the sky is the limit for Pawlenty. We might even see him, some day, on a national ticket.

I'm still in Alaska and have been watching election results unfold without having an opportunity to post. Having a few minutes this morning, I want to make a few observations on the results in Minnesota. First, the margins of several of the Republican victories were stunning. Tim Pawlenty won the gubernatorial election by eight points over Roger Moe, the majority leader of the Minnesota Senate and the most representative Democrat of his generation. Our friend John Kline won his race over incumbent Bill Luther by an astonishing eleven points, despite the $2 million Luther spent on his campaign. Mark Kennedy, also a good friend, won his re-election race by twenty-two points over an unknown Democrat who, however, also spent $2 million or more on her race. Coleman's victory over Mondale was narrower than I had expected--only two points--but, given that his opponent was the state's most iconic Democratic figure, the result is impressive. The bottom line is that Minnesota is no longer a Democratic state. A number of observers, including Hugh Hewitt, have puzzled over Minnesota's seemingly odd politics. A part of the explanation, we think, is that Minnesota is neither liberal nor conservative as much as it is populist. For two generations beginning in the 1930's, populist generally meant Democratic. That is no longer the case. As the country's politics realign along different axes, Minnesota should begin to be considered a Republican state.

I have been looking for an informative account of the situation that led to John Thune's defeat in South Dakota only after the votes in the last three precincts were reported. Byron York has the first serious piece I have found, on National Review Online: "South Dakota Suspicions." York is exceedingly cautious, but I think it's time for National Review to bring back its November 2000 post-election cover with the Gothic inscription: "Thou Shalt Not Steal."

If you can stand pop-up ads for carrot ink, George Will's evaluation of the consequences of Tuesday's results is foremost among the columns deserving of your attention today. His column is "Close, but in control." If you can't stand pop-up ads for carrot ink, go straight to Hugh Hewitt's day-after WorldNetDaily column, "A poltical Gettysburg."

Norm Coleman's parents have lived to see their son elected United States Senator, and were along for the ride as Norm canvassed the state in the hectic final hours before the election. After President and Mrs. Bush (41), they must be the proudest parents in the country. Hey guys, in Yiddish it's what we call "Naches" (pride/pleasure). Thanks to the Star Tribune for this nice portrait of Norm's day after, "Coleman's day of victory starts and ends early."

It took a day to sink in, but the comprehensive nature of the Republican victories in Minnesota on Tuesday recalls 1978's "Minnesota massacre." In Minnesota, Republicans won the statewide races for senator, governor, secretary of state, and state auditor (suburban mayor Pat Awada, a budding star). In Minnesota's congressional delegation, Republicans picked up one seat as a result of our friend John Kline's sweet, sweet victory over Bill Luther in Minnesota's redistricted second district. Minnesota's eight-member congressional delegation is now evenly divided.

In the state legislature, Republicans added to their previously narrow majority in the state house of representatives. My personal favorite, Rep. Eric Lipman of Lake Elmo, is not only one of the smartest guys in state politics, he was the number one target of the Democrats' interest groups while running for re-election in a slightly less Republican redistricted district. Eric survived the onslaught. Republicans picked up five seats in the state senate, where they have been a perpetual minority. At 31-36 (I think), they are at an all-time high-water mark and now within hailing distance of the Democrats. Dane Smith provides a good recap in "Minnesota GOP savors role in national sweep." He even quotes our friend David Strom of the Taxpayers League--after the Republican party, the Star Tribune's least favorite organization.

Sam Schulman for Jewish World Review argues that Jewish votes for Democrats speed the process by which the Democratic Party becomes the natural home for anti-Semitic sentiment. His argument is that the Dems take the Jewish vote for granted and thus feel free to pander to anti-Semitic elements. Schulman describes three such elements. First, populists connected to anti-Semitic elements within the Black community and the Arab-American population (e.g. Cynthia McKinney). Second, self-proclaimed idealists like Jimmy Carter. Third, the left-wing anti-war crowd "motivated by hatred of Israel, hatred of America, and inborn affection for bullying that is at the basis of all Socialism." Of particular concern to Schulman is the fact that elite universities, whose divestment movements equate Israel with the South Africa of 25 years ago, are becoming the "seedbeds of the new, high-minded anti-Semitism" whose leaders "will soon be dominating the Democratic Party."

Schulman perceives the problem clearly, but errs I think when he suggests that Jews can prevent the Democratic party from welcoming these enemies by making Dems work for their vote. The elements that concern Schulman have already been welcomed by the Democrats, and I suspect that Democratic strategists are resigned to the erosion of support among Jews. They expect it to occur slowly and they are probably right. But fast or slow, they understand that the erosion will be more than offset by the support gained from the constituencies described above. Jewish money is another matter, but the wealthiest Jews tend to be the most opaque, and the Democrats know that the Barbra Streisand's will be there for them no matter what. For the rest of us, the best thing we can do as Jews is to abandon the Democrats sooner rather than later, so that the Party pays the full consequences of its inevitable capture by anti-Semitic elements.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online on what the Republican agenda should be now that the party has a majority in both Houses. In his enthusiasm, Goldberg can be forgiven for identifying several things the Republicans should do "first." Goldberg also pauses to express his pleasure at how crestfallen Tom Daschle looked this morning. This article from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader has Daschle admitting that "this is the worst night I have had." Our thanks to reader Cory Skluzak for calling it to my attention.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports that the South Dakota Senate race between Tim Johnson and John Thune is heading for a recount on November 25. Johnson ended up with about a 500 vote margin. Reader Cory Skluzak urges us not to give up on Thune. He tells us that, with three precincts left to count, Thune was up by more than 800 votes. But the three precincts were all in Shannon County on one of the Indian reservations. After they were counted, the tally shifted by more than 1,300 votes. Don't worry, Mr. Skluzak, even if Trunk and I were inclined to forget about this one, the South Dakota Rocket Man would never let us. Keep us posted and we'll keep posting.

This morning at my train station, there was Chris Van Hollen, our newly elected Congressman, thanking the voters. I'm not sure what to make of this gesture. Maybe it means we'll continue to have good constituent services for a while. On the train, despite Van Hollen's victory (which will affect the vote by one Representative on maybe one or two bills per term in the House), I've never seen so many morose looking people. One lady near me was reading the front page of the Washington Post and mumbling to herself. I tried, with limited success, to suppress my grin.

Here's Mickey Kaus' take on the election. Kaus ridicules the concept of "50-50 nation." But remember, the Republicans picked up only two or three Senate seats (on a night when traditionally Republican states were almost entirely the ones in play) and only four to seven House seats. This is an excellent accomplishment in an incumbent President's first mid-term election. And it is a significant accomplishment because it leaves the Republicans with control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. But, in my view, it doesn't signal a major shift in where the electorate stands today.

A few reflections after a short night of sleep. First, the Democrats seem to be drawing the wrong lesson from their defeat, bless them. The line I heard from their shills in the wee hours was that their candidates were too "accommodationist" and that they should have been more aggressively anti-Bush. How this would have helped in Georgia, New Hampshire, South Dakota, etc. is unclear. The reality is that all but one of the swing contests this year were in states that Bush carried in 2000 when he wasn't particularly popular. The one exception is Minnesota, where the Democrats did run an aggressively anti-Bush campaign, to no avail. Second, in a sense there is less to this election than meets the eye. If the swing contests had been in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the outcome might well have been different. Note that the Democrats won the gubernatorial contests in all of these states. This is still a "50-50" nation, give or take a few. Third, if the Democrats overreact to last night by moving to the left, this will help the Republicans, at least in theory. In "50-50 nation," it's quite risky for the opposition party to stray far from the center. And the Democrats haven't elected an out-and-out liberal president in my lifetime, except for Lyndon Johnson's election under special circumstances. In practice, though, it may not matter that much who the Democrats nominate in 2004. With the Republicans in control, the election will be a referendum on President Bush. If things aren't too rocky on the international and terrorism fronts, it will be a referendum on the economy. Still, if, like today, the economy is neither that good nor that bad in 2004, it will be to our advantage if the Democrats nominate an unabashed liberal, or Al Gore posing as an unabashed liberal.

What could top off this almost perfect evening? Hugh Hewitt's new WorldNetDaily column was posted moments ago, and seems to grasp the big picture tonight better than anything else out there at this moment. The column is "Getting past the CNN-spin," and we commend it to your attention.

Getting to meet Hugh during his visit to Minneapolis this past weekend was the peak moment of what has been a magic carpet ride for us over the past month. We are sincerely grateful to him not only for his recognition, but also for his efforts to bring us to the attention of others. In his column this morning, he extends us his recognition again, and we ask your indulgence in concluding our coverage tonight with his take on our efforts here:

"[T]he new media has been an awesome check on spin. Hats off especially to the gents at Power Line who have revealed the polling operation of the Minneapolis Star Tribune to be an extension of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party and an embarrassment to journalists. The editorialists at the paper are openly hard left and collectivist, just as I am openly center-right and an enthusiast for the GOP. But the pollsters are supposed to be technicians. Thanks to Power Line, we know that the 'technicians' are either incompetent or frauds."

This morning the Star Tribune begins covering the tracks of its final pre-election Minnesota Poll results. Perhaps you can help us decipher the meaning of "Many voters had apparently not made up their minds." In the meantime, recall that we had expected Norm to do at least five points better than the Minnesota Poll's final pre-election measurement, which turned out to be 41 percent. As usual, Rob Daves (director of the Minnesota Poll, quoted in the story) has the answers, sort of, but he sounds like he may be hearing steps...

Tim Pawlenty's 45 percent of the vote (at this time) in a competitive three-way race for governor is simply breathtaking. He will face formidable challenges upon taking office, challenges including a monumental budget deficit and an obsolete metropolitan area highway system he promised to do something about. Nevertheless, we salute him and his remarkable achievement in a state with a venerable history of Democratic and/or liberal domination. The Star Tribune's story announcing Tim's victory is "Pawlenty tops Moe for governor."

It looks like the Republicans have the fifty seats, although Carnahan isn't conceding yet. In South Dakota, Johnson is winning by 3,000 votes, but the western vote will start to come in strong soon, so it seems to look good for Thune. The word in Minnesota is that Coleman is exceeding expectations and should win. Michael Barone has noted that Coleman is cleaning up in Ventura's strong areas. It looks like we'll have a Lincoln Chafee proof Senate. The next big one to watch is the California gubernatorial race. It's even right now, early in the tabulation process.

I'm going to sign off and try to sleep. If I'm too excited to do so, maybe I'll log on again. This looks like a great night. Congratulations to Rocket Man for being perhaps the first to call Minnesota correctly (assuming things go as now expected). On the same assumption, I extend my insincere condolences to the now discredited Star Tribune polling deparatment. Thanks to everyone for all the support for Power Line the past few weeks. We hope you'll stay with us for post mortems and other commentary in the coming months.

I'm back from the Minnesota Republican Party's headquarters in Bloomington, Minnesota this evening. I went looking to pick up some kind of dope on the big statewide races and have come back empty handed. Looking at returns, the single most promising pickup here is Tim Pawlenty in the governor's race. Tim is one of the most talented politicians I have ever met; he is young, handsome, principled, gifted with people, and has a great personal story. He signed the Taxpayer League's no new taxes pledge at the outset of his campaign. We haven't talked about him much on this site because of the limited interest in the race outside Minnesota, but if he wins, keep an eye on him.

Listening to the radio on the way home from the hotel, I heard Mondale's son Ted, who is also an ambitious young politician, on the radio. To me he sounded down about the senate race. Watching Mondale address his supporters at DFL headquarters on television, his smile looks forced, although he's not the world's most genuine person under the best of circumstances. More I cannot say on that score at this point. Should Norm pull the race out, however, he too will be vaulted into national prominence, and he absolutely has the political skills to be a player for a long time to come. I'm afraid we'll have to hold our breath overnight and into the morning.

After Norm's, the race we have worried most about is that of our friend John Kline in Minnesota's redistricted Second District. John is running against an incumbent Democratic congressman named Bill Luther, whom I have known for a long time. In his desperation to hold onto his seat, Bill has resorted to bottom of the barrel tactics whose details need not be related at this point. As much as we have grown to dislike Bill as a politician, we admire John. He is a retired Marine Colonel who has rendered great service to the United States and has much more to offer as a congressman in a time of war. It looks at this point like John may well pull this race out. If so, Minnesota will have accounted for one Republican pickup (out of only eight seats) in each of the past two elections. If not, we will have to console ourselves with having held Mark Kennedy's seat against a self-funded millionaire challenger. I think I should leave it at that for now.

John Kline, Rocket Man's guy for Congress, is leading comfortably. C-SPAN is interviewing Kline right now and the assumption seems to be that he has won. I'm encouraging Rocket Man and Trunk to come to Washington for the swearing in. Based on Rocket Man's glowing comments on Kline, I kicked in a small campaign contribution. So maybe we can all get together for the victory celebration.

The path to Senate victory is now clear. The Republicans are leading in Texas, Colorado, and Missouri. None of these races is won yet, but if all three leads hold up, then the Republicans have their 50 seats, with Minnesota, South Dakota, and Louisiana still in play as possible pick-ups.

In addition, Fox News is reporting that the White House is now convinced, based on the reports it has received from "operatives" in Minnesota, that Coleman and Pawlenty are going to win. Rocket Man and Trunk, have you been talking to Rove?

And Michael Barone, also on Fox, is predicting a small Republican gain in the House.

A bad night for venerable, 70 something, liberal/moderate, female Republicans in the state of Maryland. Helen Bentley has apparently lost in Bob Ehrlich's old district. Redistricting figured in that race too.

Connie Morella, who has been my Congresswoman since 1986, is conceding defeat, the victim of big-time redistricting. She looks as good in defeat as she did in victory.

Van Hollen leads Morella 52-48 with about 85 percent of the vote counted. Ehrlich leads Townsend 53-47 with more than 90 percent counted. Ehrlich is expected to give a victory speech soon. His supporters are claiming that he may have received 20 percent of the African American vote. An historic day in Maryland.

The Republicans are having a good night in the Northeast and Southeast, to say the least. The Senate pick-up in Georgia is a wonderful result and holding onto the New Hampshire seat is brilliant as well. Jeb Bush just crushed McBride, undoubtedly to the chagrin of Mr. McAuliffe and other vengeful Democrats. I don't know much about the Mitt Romney, who has just been declared the winner of the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts. However, I started rooting for him ardently after he called his female opponent's conduct "unbecoming" and was attacked by the feminists for sexism. "Unbecoming" is a nice, understated description of the conduct Democratic politicians, male and female, throughout the nation, so it's gratifying that there apparently is no penalty associated with using the term.

Well, the T-Wolves have just come back from 13 down to take the lead over the Wizards. But there may not be any way back for Connie Morella who trails Democrat Chris Van Hollen 52-47 with more than half of the vote counted in Maryland's Eighth District. In the governor's race, it's a dead heat between Ehrlich and Townsend so far. The Baltimore County vote supposedly is just starting to come in. Ehrlich has a big edge there. On the other hand, the Dems usually hold out some Baltimore City votes, real or imagined, just in case they are needed at the end. There's no way to call this one yet.

We understand that the Voter News Service consortium has scrapped its exit poll projections today because of concerns about their reliability. From here on in, our analysis and commentary on particular races will be based on actual returns.

Our readers have provided us some of the best information we have received on current races. This afternoon our reader Mark Oakley wrote us as follows from Colorado:

"The Republican Party formed a '96 hour task force' months ago to get out the vote in Colorado. It is a well-funded, well-organized effort, and they recruited and trained all the volunteers they needed a long time ago. However, all Republicans can still do their part to get out the vote by making sure everybody they know votes. Also, don't believe the VNS exit polling about the Colorado Senate
race. The Republicans made a huge effort to get absentee ballot applications mailed to every Republican in the state (in Colorado, you don't need a reason to request an absentee ballot.) In addition to the absentee ballots, the most heavily Republican areas of the state had large early voting numbers, and a lot of the Republican support in Colorado comes from small towns where the VNS is unlikely to have a presence. So the majority of people going to the polls where the VNS is likely to have a presence will be Democrats."

Mark concludes with this observation, which will have continuing relevance past this evening: "Politics is not Rocket Science, but all the Rocket Scientists I know are Republican."

The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last on some of the Democrats' last-minute dirty tricks in Maryland and New Hampshire. In passing, Last notes that Maryland's Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Ehrlich picked an African-American running mate, Michael Steele. Years ago, Steele worked as a legal assistant at the law firm I was with. I didn't work with him, but he was an exceedingly personable fellow with an impressive presence. Ehrlich presumably picked Steele in part to attract African-American voters. It hasn't worked. The polls show with Ehrlich at 7% among blacks. But my theory is that Steele is an asset nonetheless. His presence on the ticket helps reinforce Ehrlich's message that he is a "moderate" not a "right-winger." In addition, I think Maryland swing voters may have been turned off when Townsend's African-American supporters passed out oreo cookies, the racial slur that blacks sometimes use against one another, during a debate. In any event, last night, in what must have been just about the last Ehrlich television spot of the campaign, Michael Steele appeared solo urging Marylanders to support Bob Ehrlich.

Here is Fred Barnes' guide to keeping score while watching the election returns. My advice, for what it's worth, is not to watch the networks at all. Either follow the election on the internet, where you can look at the races you're interested in and avoid mindless blather and bias, or find something entirely different to do and check in towards the end of the evening, when things have started to take shape. I'll probably watch the Washington Wizards take on the Minnesota T-Wolves and check in on the election during time-outs.

Here in the Washington, D.C. area, the weather has turned cold and it is raining. Evening turnout may be affected.

Election update: We have touched base with Rocket Man's sources within the state Republican Party and the Coleman campaign. Based on our interviews, it is our understanding that the party itself is doing no exit polling this year. The only exit poll being conducted today is one conducted for news outlets by Voter News Service (VNS). VNS has limited the distribution of its survey data until after the polls close tonight, but Drudge reports that the exit poll has Coleman plus three at this point.

Our Coleman campaign sources state that they believe turnout is high so far today. Based on its tracking polls, the Coleman campaign believes that high turnout will be favorable to Norm. I will not expand on the rationale because I'm dubious, but I pass it along as representing the thinking of the Coleman campaign at this point.

I should have made it clear that, when Mr. Sharf reported on the Owens effort in Colorado, he specified that he didn't see signs of "on-the-ground, door-to-door" GOTV work.

Gene Allen, another of our readers and a long-time friend of Trunk, notes that, according to Hugh Hewitt, the Colorado Republican get-out-the-vote effort has been strong and that Governor Owens has been the driving force. Gene adds that he hopes the Allard campaign's failure to return Mr. Sharf's call won't discourage him from attending tonight's victory party.

Another correspondent from Colorado reports as follows: "I called the Colorado Republican Party this morning to volunteer my services in getting out the vote. They said they would call back if they needed me, and by mid-day still have not done so. I am beginning to conclude that they have an overwhelming number of volunteers."

One of our readers, Joshua Sharf, reports from Colorado that (1) the weather is gorgeous all over the state, (2) in Denver there were early voting booths set up in a number of supermarkets the past few days (no word, Sharf says, on whether the Dems were offering double coupons), (3) the Allard campaign never called Sharf back when he called to volunteer for get out the vote work, nor did Governor Owens seem to be doing any get out the vote work, and (4) Hugh Hewitt did special morning "remotes" to Colorado yesterday and today. Sharf also believes, based on conversations with a member of an old-line Louisiana Democrat family, that Landrieu could be vulnerable in a run-off. Bush is extremely popular in Louisiana and while Landrieu is not unpopular, Daschle is.

Stephen Moore of the conservative Club for Growth identifies ten races that he feels should be of particular interest to conservatives. Moore includes only three Senate races: New Hampshire, South Carolina, and New Jersey. According to Moore, the latter contest matters only because it tests whether "cheaters can prosper." All indications are that, at least in this instance, they can.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Our colleague and faithful reader Peter Swanson writes that he "half expected Mondale to refer to Coleman as 'Sonny.'" And let us add to the mix the column of the great Thomas Sowell, "Mondale's 'Experience.'"

I've been predicting that Connie Morella will lose to Democratic challenger Chris Van Hollen here in Maryland's 8th District. I'm not going to change my prediction, but some fairly savvy people are saying that Connie might just pull it out, now that it seems highly probable that the Republicans will hold the House. The logic is that the liberal swing voters really like Connie, and were leaning against her only because they want to see the Dems capture the House. If that hope is seen as unrealistic, these voters may "come home" to Connie. Of course, conservatives like me were motivated to vote for Connie laregly by the parallel rationale -- to keep Republican control. But there aren't that many conservatives here. Anyway, I voted before I heard about this logic. Plus, I promised my daughter, who worked for Connie, that I would forgive Connie's vote against Clinton's impeachment and vote for her this time.

I voted this morning amidst what must had to be the largest turnout in a mid-term election during the 20 years I've been voting in Maryland. Connie Morella, our Congressperson, voted about ten minutes before me with television cameras there to capture the event. Connie looked tired but still ten years younger than her age (72, I believe). Heavy turnout in my neck of the woods favors Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in the gubernatorial race. In the congressional race, it is probable a neutral development for Connie. However, it is black turnout that is seen as critical in these races. I saw only a handful of African Americans, but that simply reflects the demographics of my neighborhood.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Our reader Jim Melcher has forwarded the take of the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes; it's called "Well, he didn't drool."

We usually count on Rocket Man to tap his sources for access to inside information, but he is off in Alaska working all week. In his absence we will do our best to tap his sources for exit poll information on the Minnesota senate and gubernatorial races, and will update the site during the day with whatever reliable information we are able to obtain.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Our faithful reader Kirk Kolbo pointed out to me last night that Jodi Wilgoren is one of the New York Times reporters whose page-one "editorials" have made the paper a laughingstock among conservatives. Her account of the debate, "For Minnesota, a late debate in altered race," runs in this morning's paper.

Viewers of the debate could not help noting that Norm unfailingly referred to Mondale as "Mr. Vice President." Mondale returned the favor by calling him "Norman" throughout the debate. Wilgoren's story includes Mondale's explanation why he did so: "That's his first name." We don't think so.

We think Mondale called him "Norman" instead of "Norm" or "Mayor Coleman" or "Mr. Mayor" because his adviser David Lillehaug told him to. (We think David told him to call Norm "Norman" because David thought it was a clever way for Mondale to diminish Norm. But don't Americans instinctively root for David versus Goliath?) David's the same adviser Mondale used to coach him in his debates with Ronald Reagan in 1984, and he has been Mondale's primary adviser in this race since the day after Senator Wellstone's death. We can only hope that the upshot of David's advice in 2002 will be roughly comparable to what it was in 1984.

Among the good news yesterday was America's successful strike at the al Qaeda thug who masterminded the Cole attack. I love the New York Post's account of the strike, "Hell Fire." I also love President Bush's comment on the strike: "The only way to treat them is [for] what they are - international killers. And the only way to find them is to be patient and steadfast, and hunt them down."

In his weekly New York Post column, the incomparable Daniel Pipes reviews the current popularity in the Arab world of a classic anti-Semitic fraud perpetrated by the Czar's secret police, "The Protocolols of the Elders of Zion." The "Protocols" were of course one of Hitler's favorite books. (In the first chapter of Der Fuehrer, his ground-breaking 1944 biography of Hitler, the German expatriate Konrad Heiden dramatically recounted the story of the creation of the "Protocols.") Unfortunately, as Pipes demonstrates, the Arab world in which this fraud has become wildly popular extends to Paterson, New Jersey. Pipes's column is "The Paterson 'Protocols.'"

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Virtually all of the reports on the debate that we have posted are from conservative commentators. However, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, a well respected pundit around here and hardly a conservative, has said on Fox News that Coleman clearly had the better of it today. Sabato also thinks that Chambliss trounced Cleland in the recent Georgia debate. He now regards both races as pure toss-ups and thinks the Republicans have at least a 50-50 chance of gaining control of the Senate. Even more than the debates, Sabato thinks that President Bush's campaigning is making the difference.

As the campaign draws to a close, liberals in the media continue to decry "negative advertising." Some, like Alan Colmes, are even invoking the spectre of the Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign. Attacks against that ad had the Republicans on the defensive for a decade, but in fact the Horton ad was entirely legitimate and illustrates the point I made last night -- that negative ads often provide accurate and relevant information to voters.

For those who never saw, or don't remember, the Horton ad, here are the relevant facts. Horton was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Massachusetts. Michael Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. His state had a program under which convicts could be released for weekends. Dukakis had inherited the program from his predecessor, but he ardently supported it and even vetoed a bill under which first degree murderers such as Horton would have been barred from obtaining furloughs. As a result, Horton was able to get a weekend pass. During one of his weekends of freedom, he kidnaapped a young couple, stabbed the man, and repeatedly raped the woman. Dukakis nonetheless continued the weekend pass program for more than a year and publicly defended it by claiming that Horton's crime spree was an exception.

Al Gore had raised this issue during his primary campaign against Dukakis. A political action committee supporting George Bush revived the issue. Its ad began by noting that Bush supports the death penalty, while Dukakis not only opposes it but also grants weekend passes to first degree murderers. The ad then shifted to a picture of Willie Horton, a black man looking menacing and unsavory, as is the tendency among murderers and rapists of all races. The narrator related the Horton affair as stated above and concluded by saying, "Weekend passes, Dukakis on crime."

The Horton ad was accurate in every respect and provided voters with pertinent information. It dealt with a fundamental issue of public policy -- the punishment of violent criminals. It also demonstrated a disturbing tendency by Dukakis not to let common sense interfere with liberal social experimentation. Dukakis had declared that the election was about competence, not ideology. The Willie Horton affair undercut Dukakis' attempt to stipulate ideology out of the campaign even as it raised questions about his competence. Nor was there anything racist about using Horton's picture. Print news stories about the affair that appeared long before the Republicans raised the issue had included the same picture.

The real problem with the Horton ad was that it held a liberal accountable for the consequences of his policies. Liberals wish to be judged only by their intentions which, they assure us, are always entirely noble. Thus, because liberals intend to provide both security from terrorism and security for bureaucrats, they find it improper for Republicans to suggest that the consequence of too much job security might well be too little national security. Fortunately, to the consternation of the media, the Republicans seem finally to have gotten over the Willie Horton hangover, and are now less cowed by the self-appointed arbiters of political taste into pulling their punches. In other words, they are once again prepared to do their duty as politicians.

More on the Wellstone death rally (a/k/a the Mondale campaign): Or is that a death rattle? Whatever it is, it ain't pretty. We'd get mad if it wasn't ending tomorrow, but the Star Tribune's account of the Mondale post-debate doings reeks of morbidity. The headline is a mouthful, suggesting the Strib's guy at the night desk is losing it too: "After an aggression-free five days, Mondale's gloves come off."

At this point it's difficult to separate hopes from predictions, but here's mine: Mondale will be putting the gloves on again and hurrying back to his board meetings on Wednesday. And if I'm wrong, unlike the members of the political class, I'll be the first to say so and try to let you know where I went wrong.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: United Press International obviously can't declare a winner. However, it strives to create the impression that Mondale won by giving him the first word (quoting him in the article's title "You're not listening'), the last word (another quote from Mondale), and the final word in nearly every exchange reported. UPI's account makes no mention of any of the issues on which York thinks Mondale had difficulty. However, it does report that callers to the radio station said prior to the debate that "they know who Mondale was, but they don't know who he is today and they find that lack of information troubling." I suspect that those who listened to the debate will conclude that Mondale today is simply a much older version of who he was 30 years ago.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate. Here's Byron York's detailed account of the debate for National Review Online. York sees the debate as a clear victory for Coleman. From York's account, one gets the impression that Mondale started reasonably well but faded under pressure. According to York, Mondale had trouble with questions about breaking with the trial lawyers over the terrorism insurance bill, what we should do about Iraq if the U.N. fails to act, whether welfare reform has been a good thing, and how to keep Minnesota on the cutting edge of technology. It also sounds like Coleman struck just the right tone by being respectful towards Mondale while persistently challenging him.

The good news this evening comes courtesy of CNN's report, "Sources: US kills Cole suspect."

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: John Fund of the Wall Street Journal finds that Coleman "cleaned Mr. Mondale's grandfather clock." Our thanks to reader Peter Anderson for pointing us to Fund's report.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Tom Bevan of the invaluable RealClearPolitics has just posted a great blog on the debate. He declares Norm the winner by a wide margin.

More on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Our faithful reader Gene Allen has a higher threshold for pain than I do, and was therefore able to stick with the debate longer than I did. Gene writes us as follows:

"Coleman did a good job tying Mondale to Jimmy Carter and the past ('welfare was a good idea when the vice president worked on it a long time ago...') and reminded voters of the 24 percent interest rates, double digit inflation and gas lines when Mondale was vice president. Mondale responded. 'This election is about the future, it's not about the collapse of the Shah …'

"Other observations: Mondale accused Coleman of supporting tax cuts for the wealthy; Mondale said Minnesota needs an independent voice in the senate--perhaps he didn't know that Governor Ventora had already appointed Dean Barkley; Mondale said if we are really interested in our schools we must increase support for them--again he seemed to be trying to rally his base.

"Coleman responded, 'You're absolutely right, and we've done it. We joined together and passed increases in the levy coupled with accountability.' Mondale seemed to be focusing on shoring up his base--support for government unions, NOW and schools."

The National Review's Byron York reports on Republican fears that one or more Senate contest will result in a court challenge. The most likely candidates are Minnesota (over absentee ballots), South Dakota (fraudulent voting on the Indian reservations), and Missouri (the usual irregularities, plus something called "provisional voting," whereby people who may not be registered are allowed to vote pending a later determination of their eligibility).

The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last on the "dirty Democrats." As Last demonstrates through one example after another, "the Democrats haven't just become Nixon, they've become the exaggerated liberal nightmare version of Nixon: Today Democrats are what they believe Nixon was." Last claims that "none of this has been lost on the public." We'll see. As I have said in past blogs, the Democrats think they can get away with taking the low road because they are confident that the press and their core constituencies won't object. If the Democrats hold the Senate and gain a majority among governors, what reason will they have to moderate their tactics next time?

Update on the Mondale/Coleman debate: Mondale was aggressive and not particularly nice; Norm was eager to sound polite but firm and energetic. They spent the first 10 minutes talking about prescription drugs. Personally, I was disappointed. Our friends at RealClearPolitics who watched the debate thought Norm did well. As to the swing voters who may vote for either Mondale or Coleman, and as to whom I have no comprehension, I have no sense whatsoever whether this event could have helped Norm.

I'm heading for the airport and will be in Alaska for the next week. I'll post a little when I have the opportunity, but Deacon and the Trunk will be on the job, so stay tuned to Power Line for election developments. Before I go, here are my predictions for the key Senate races:

New Hampshire: Shaheen in a squeaker.
Colorado: This was Allard's race to win, but I don't think he's gotten the job done. Strickland by a point or two.
Missouri: Talent relatively easily.
South Dakota: Thune over Johnson by the narrowest of margins.
Arkansas: Pryor over Hutchinson; late-breaking news about Pryor's illegal household help gives Hutchinson a lift, but not quite enough.
New Jersey: Forrester closes a little, but nowhere near enough; Lautenberg by eight points.
Georgia: Chambliss closes hard, but it's Cleland by two points.
Texas: The Democrats were dreaming on this one; Cornyn by ten.
Minnesota: Coleman, and it's not as close as people think: Coleman 50%, Mondale 45%, others 5%.

If we add that up, the net result leaves the Senate exactly where it is now. I hope I'm wrong about New Hampshire and Colorado; I don't think the Republicans will do any worse than the above scenario, and they could do better.

As to the other Minnesota races, Pawlenty should be elected Governor relatively easily: Pawlenty 40%, Moe 34%, Penny 26%. Mark Kennedy overcomes the sleaziest campaign within memory and wins 55%-45%. My biggest concern is about our friend John Kline, whose opponent, Bill Luther, has launched a fraudulent last-ditch advertising blitz in which he tries to portray Kline as a tax-raiser and himself as the low-tax candidate. Unbelievable. Most people think Luther's strategy with this late ad campaign is to drive voters toward the fictitious "No New Taxes Party" candidate--actually a Democratic activist who filed, with the encouragement of Luther's campaign, to siphon off conservative votes. I think Kline will overcome Luther's slimy tactics, but narrowly: 51% to 49%.

The Coleman/Mondale debate is beginning in about two hours. I'm sure the Trunk will post his impressions. As I understand the format, most of the questions will be asked by members of the audience, who are activists from one party or the other. It will be interesting to see whether and how those questions are filtered through a moderator; if the audience members are questioning the candidates directly, we'll see hostile, aggressive Democrats attacking Coleman and polite, respectful Republicans questioning Mondale. Stay tuned for the Trunk's report.

On Saturday we reported on the New York Times/CBS News poll that showed the Republicans jumping out to a seven-point lead in the generic Congressional preference poll. Agreeing for once with the Times, we didn't attach much significance to it. This morning, however, USA Today, in a story headlined "Late Shift Appears to Favor GOP," reports that the Republicans now have a six point lead, 51% to 45%, in the last pre-election USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll. So it does appear that quite a few voters are breaking toward the GOP. Whether this affects the relatively few competitive races that will determine the composition of the House and Senate remains to be seen, but it appears, at a minimum, that the Republicans should be insulated against a disastrous Tuesday night.

More on the Wellstone death rally: William Tucker has a fine column in this morning's New York Post regarding the Democrats' old time religion. The piece is "That old time...politics."

Yesterday's St. Paul Pioneer Press carried a column I had missed about its internal deliberations over its Mondale/Coleman poll. The column suggests that the Mason-Dixon organization intensified its polling efforts toward the end of the Wednesday-Friday polling period. I wonder if the "snapshot" captured by the poll results reflects Coleman momentum that picked up during the week as the state felt the aftershocks of the Wellstone death rally. The column is "Election turmoil raised question when, whether to poll voters."

Our reader Jason Feffer found us through the Web site of the great Hugh Hewitt. Jason has forwarded a brilliant piece on the sickness at the heart of the Democratic party. The piece is called "Democratic Party Corruption," and we commend it to your attention.

The Star Tribune's campaign coverage this morning has a couple of stories worth reading. The paper's account of President Bush's appearance for Norm yesterday notes that the president referred to Xcel Center as the house that Norm built. I didn't know that when I did the same twice yesterday. The story on Norm's campaign is "Coleman energized."

The companion story on Mondale's campaign is "Bush to Mondale: Not so fast." The Strib's account of Mondale's Sunday campaigning has a hilarious senior (liberal) moment. Yesterday Mondale came out for tax cuts. Unfortunately, the tax cuts would be limited to a group just about about the same size as the group Ann Coulter deduced that Joe Lieberman belongs to: orthodox Jews for partial birth abortion.

Here's the Strib account of the Mondale tax cut plan: "Mondale said he would work to obtain tax credits for farmers who install wind turbines on their land. As he spoke in a pole barn to about 150 chilled supporters, two turbines turned quickly in a nearby field.

"'It's impossible for a farmer to get a tax credit for building these wind-powered fans, but if you are a company you can get the credit,' Mondale said. 'That's got to be corrected so a farmer can put these kind of towers up, produce the kind of power that we need, pull us away from the dependence on foreign energy and make a little money off it.'" Right on!

David Broder is the Washington Post's lead writer on politics, and has been for too many years. Like so many in media, he loves to scold politicians for running negative ads. Apparently, it has never occurred to him that these ads, when truthful, often provide valuable information to voters. In today's column, Broder reports that, when two consultants pointed this out to him, he was "shocked." The statements of the two consultants probably contain as much wisdom as anything that has ever appeared in a Broder column. Donna Lucas, of the American Association of Political Consultants (yes, such an organization exists), told Broder, "People say they hate negative ads, but really they want to compare the candidates. They want to know not only the reason to vote for someone, but also not to vote for the other one." Ken Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin shocked Broder even more with this statement that strikes me as clearly correct: "We should not necessarily see negative ads as a harmful part of our electoral system. They are much more likely [than positive ads] to be about policy, to use supporting information, and to be reliable."

Robert Kagan on how France has managed so far to tie American diplomats in knots at the U.N. Security Council. Kagan points out that the U.S. shouldn't feel singled out -- France is being equally difficult with Germany and England on European issues. But with the stakes so high when it comes to Iraq, one hopes that President Bush will brush France aside and get us moving towards regime change once the election is over.

For those of you who like political predictions by folks who probably don't know any more than you do, here are the predictions of a panel assembled by the Washington Post. The two panelists whose opiinions I value most are Bill Kristol and Amy Walter of Charlie Cook's group. Walter, who had the best picks when the Post ran this feature in 2000, predicts that the Dems will hold onto 50 Senate seats, with the Republicans gaining a 12 vote majority in the House. She sees the Democrats winning a 27 to 22 majority among governors. Kristol sees almost the same outcomes in the House and gubernatorial contests, but predicts that the Dems will incrrease their edge in the Senate to 52-47. Both Walter and Kristol see Democrat Chris Van Hollen defeating incumbent Connie Morella in Maryland's Eighth district, and I'm afraid that I agree. Each panelist makes one wild-card prediction. Kristol's is that Coleman wins in Minnesota.

In the post below we refer to St. Paul's Xcel Center as the house that Norm built. It therefore makes perfect sense that President Bush appeared this afternoon on behalf of Norm at Xcel Center, before a crowd of 10,000.

The Pioneer Press account of the event, "Bush urges St. Paul crowd to support Coleman," is interesting. What I found most of interest was the apparent feistiness of the supporters who showed up for the event. The article notes that a small group of anti-war protesters also showed up outside the Xcel Center chanting dopey slogans and waving dopey signs, but that they were met with a response that is a little unusual for Minnesota Republicans: "[The protesters] chanted slogans and carried banners reading 'Make jobs, not war,' 'No blood for oil' and 'Clean energy, not polluting energy.' Others carried Wellstone and Mondale posters. One apparent conspiracy theorist held a sign with Wellstone’s picture and the question, Accident?' In response to the peace protesters, some Bush supporters chanted, 'We want war! We want war!'"

Given Americans' instinctive and altogether healthy dislike of politicians, few politicians can risk the spontaneous reaction of a large sports crowd. Recall, for example, Yankee fan Hillary Clinton and her studious avoidance of any personal appearance at a Yankees game during the Yankees' most recent World Series appearance.

Our correspondent CD has alerted us to his own blog fraterslibertas. Yesterday he posted a long blog about Norm Coleman's appearance at the Minnesota Wild hockey game at St. Paul's Xcel Center (the house that Norm built). CD's dispatch from the game is worth quoting at length:

"Just got back from the Minnesota Wild game (they lost 4-2, in a wholly uninspired performance against the generic Vancouver Canucks). The most animated the crowd got was at the beginning of the 3rd period, when suddenly a small hubbub began somewhere in the seats behind me, which then grew to a mild roar from those in my entire section and then those in adjoining section too. I naturally presumed the interns from the Wild marketing department were handing out 'specially-sized' packets of Ritz Bits or something similarly as meaningless, yet always guaranteed to drive the crowd to frenzied distraction from the actual purpose of their $55 per seat outlay for tickets. But no, this time there was an actual happening occurring. That would be the belated entrance of Norm Coleman to the game, as he and his lovely wife Laurie, slowly made their way to their seats. Norm seemed touched by the extended and enthusiastic recognition, so much so he laid his hand over his heart and then started blowing kisses to the crowd (really). Which I think goes to prove that you can take a candidate out of the Democratic Party, but you can never fully extract the Democratic party out of the candidate.

"After Norm sat down (one section over and two rows behind me) a steady stream of admirers approached him for autographs and to wish him well. Lots of hugs and back slaps and a lucky few (who presumably were already acquainted with the Colemans) got a kiss from beautiful, blonde Laurie. Soon thereafter, a camera crew got down there and during the next break in the game, they put Norm's image up on the scoreboard, which resulted in a huge ovation from the crowd. This wasn't just polite applause, rather it was an affectionate, full-throated cheer, lasting for a good 30 seconds. This time Norm simply stood, smiled widely and waved - thank God. (Is it possible his image consultants had gotten back to him so quickly about the adverse reaction to his Juan Peron-style kiss blowing? If so, I'd like to believe my quizzical glance had something to do with it.) The sections around us started the 'Norm! Norm! Norm!' chant - but just then the cameras cut away, as the game had begun once again, and this demonstration never had a chance to grow in scope.

"No doubt the crowd can't be considered a complete cross section of the Minnesota electorate. St. Paul is Norm's town (despite the fact it went for Ventura in the 1998 Gubernatorial race), the Wild's presence and the return of the NHL to Minnesota are rightly credited to Coleman's influence thus making hockey fans more prone to lean his way, and the crowd was made up disproportionately of suburban, white, other than lower class males. But by no means can this crowd be considered uniformly Republican. In fact, most of those in the monied classes in St. Paul, who are in abundance at these games, are typically Democratic partisans. And I can't imagine a single other political figure from the state getting such an enthusiastic and affectionate response from 18,500 citizens brought together for legitimately nonpartisan purposes."

Today's Zogby poll: Our faithful reader Brian Sullivan has forwarded us John Zogby's poll results on the Minnesota senate race (thanks, Brian). Based on a sample of 500 likely voters over Thursday-Saturday (one day forward of the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press polls), Zogby has Mondale in the lead 50-45, with a 4.5 percent margin of error. He notes that Minnesotans agreed with Governor Ventura's negative assessment of the Wellstone death rally by a margin of 55-30 percent. His commentary on the results is as follows: "Mondale leads but there is evidence that Coleman is coming on in the waning days. This will be a squeaker."

According to the compilation of our friends at RealClearPolitics, all four of the bigfoot political reporters on Meet the Press this morning picked Mondale to win the Mondale/Coleman senate race. Our focus here is analysis and commentary rather than prognostication. But our analysis, based on the information available to us, suggests that Coleman is going to pull this race out.

Here RealClearPolitcs compiles the Minnesota senate race poll results (as well as the latest poll results in the other competitive senate races) and offers its own prognostication(s).

More on the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll: Today's Star Tribune Minnesota Poll Mondale/Coleman results are reported in the long story by Patricia Lopez that we link to below in our first post today. That story refers repeatedly to the poll results as representing the views of "likely voters." So do several captions on the Star Tribune's graphic representations of the poll results. As we have explained previously, however, this description is highly misleading, if not false.

The fine print regarding how the poll was conducted is carried in a sidebar on page A15 of the paper under the heading "How the poll was conducted." Today's Minnesota Poll is based on a sample that included 915 respondents.

Here is the critical information: "The sample first was weighted to take into account unequal probability of selection from sampling: Weighting accounts for the number of telephone lines in a sampled household and the number of adults in the household. It also is weighted on certain demographic characteristics, including gender, age and education based on the 2000 census of the adult population, and on geography. It is assumed to be representative of adults in all English-speaking Minnesota households, within the margin of sampling error. The results also were weighted to account for likelihood to vote.

"Researchers modeled the likely electorate for the general election using four questions: past voting history, current registration status, interest in the election, and self-professed probability of voting. Summing the responses to those questions produced an 8-point index. Respondents were weighted according to their scores on the index. Those most likely to vote (registered, voted in '98, definitely will vote, high interest) were assigned larger weights and those least likely to vote (not registered, didn't vote in '98, won't vote and low interest) received smaller weights. Assignments are based on formulas verified in past elections. This model suggests a turnout of 60.2 percent of the voting age population, higher than estimates in June, September and October. In the last comparable election (U.S. Senate and governor in a non-presidential year, 1994) the turnout was 53.4 percent. However, in 1998, a gubernatorial-only election, 60.5 percent of the eligible adults turned out."

As of the Star Tribune's last Wellstone/Coleman poll, the Star Tribune was projecting a turnout of slightly over 55 percent. It appears that in addition to the usual adjustments made by the Minnesota Poll, today's higher projection pads the Mondale lead reported by the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

We have it on good authority that the reason the Republican Party pulled its ad attacking Mondale's record as Vice-President is that the party's own polling, together with an intuitive sense of how the race is going, indicate that Coleman is ahead and momentum is on his side. The party knew that releasing the ad would cause a controversy, and feared the controversy might disrupt the currently favorable dynamics of the campaign. Hence the decision to pull the ad.

A reader whose wife is an election judge in a Twin Cities suburb sent us this extremely interesting account of how ballots in Minnesota's Senate race will be tabulated. The key point, which I hadn't previously understood, is that all Senate ballots--not just the absentee ballots--will be hand counted rather than being run through machines. Moreover, election judges are being given directions on how to determine "voter intent." Thus, the potential for a Florida-like fiasco exists. The key error lies, I think, in thinking that the purpose should be to determine "voter intent" and that a hand review can do this more accurately than a machine reading. In fact, not everything a person does with a ballot constitutes a vote. For some reason, approximately two to three percent of all voters in all elections do something screwy with their ballots rather than casting a proper vote. It is futile and unfair to try to scrutinize ballots that are not properly filled out to try to determine "voter intent." As Justice O'Connor pointed out during the argument of Gore v. Bush, the only coherent standard for determining "voter intent" is the instructions given to the voter. If a voter, for example, writes "I'm for Fritz!" in the margin of the ballot and draws an arrow to the oval next to Mondale's name, but does not fill in the oval, he may have indicated some kind of intent, but he has not voted. Likewise, if a voter writes "Mondale sucks!" on his ballot but fails to properly fill in one of the ovals, he may have clearly expressed an opinion, but he has not cast a ballot. Our reader has offered to send us a copy of the instructions being given to vote-tabulators on how to evaluate voter intent; perhaps it will allay our concerns to some degree. But at present, it appears that Minnesota may be embarking down the same path that led to disaster in Florida. Here is our reader's email:

"When a voter arrives at the polls, he will be handed 3 pieces of paper. One local/fed/state, 1 judicial and 1 supplemental. At the time the ballots are presented to the voter, the judges are to cross off the preprinted senate race with a pink highlighter and make specific note to the voter of this invalid section and of the supplemental ballot as replacement. The entire Senate race (both supplemental and absentee ballots) will be hand counted. Absentee ballots will be delivered after the polls close to each precinct.
Judges will go though each one and match it with the voting record, ensuring that the voter is eligible in that precinct. Additionally, if the voter voted in person, the absentee ballot will be considered spoiled and the 'in person' vote will count.

Supplemental ballots will also be counted by hand. Rather than being run through the counting machine, they will be placed in cardboard boxes (by an election judge, not by the voter, which I'm assuming is intended to help minimize stuffing) and hand counted at the end of the evening.

There is a concern over fraudulent ballots due to the 'easily photocopied' nature of the supplemental ballot, so each must have the initials of two judges on the back side to be considered valid. However, initialing will be done both en-masse before the polls
open and during the day if additional are needed, rather than one at a time as each is handed to a voter, which leaves open the possibility that excess pre-initialed ballots might make their way into someone's hands.

Judges were given instructions about 'voter intent' because it's a hand count. Normally, during a machine count, things like the name circled, 'Fritz', an X in the oval would be kicked out by the machine, but since a hand count is taking place, judgment comes into play.

Poll watchers without credentials are only allowed in the polls after 8p to watch the hand count.

Hope you find this information useful. I have a copy of the official procedures and 'Determining Voter Intent' sheet if you're interested. I really enjoy the work you and your buddies put into Powerline. Please keep up the excellent work."

With the St. Paul Pioneer Press poll showing Coleman with a six-point lead and the Minneapolis Star Tribune poll giving an identical lead to Mondale, the difference between traditional polling methods and the methods used by the Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll--dissected here by the Trunk over the last week--has been starkly framed. The Star Tribune's credibility is on the line in this race.

More on the Wellstone death rally: This time from our favorite, Mark Steyn, in "Was that a funeral or a circus?" Thanks to our friends at RealClearPolitics for making sure we didn't miss this column this morning.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press endorses Coleman over Mondale this morning; the editorial is "Coleman prepared to provide energetic leadership." Editorial writer Steve Dornfeld also has a companion column, "Wellstone's death raised questions about whether to endorse in Senate race."

Unlike the Pioneer Press, The Star Tribune has been running its editorials on its news pages all week; its editorial endorsement of Mondale today is superfluous.

The Star Tribune's final pre-election poll shows Mondale leading Coleman 46-41; the final pre-election poll of the St. Paul Pioneer Press shows Coleman leading Mondale 47-41. Both polls were conducted Wedneday through Friday of this week. The Strib story is "Mondale, Coleman in statistical tie." The Pioneer Press story is "Voters as volatile as race."

The Strib reports the result as a "statistical dead heat" because of the Minnesota Poll's margin of error, but here's the critical paragraph regarding the PP poll: "The St. Paul Pioneer Press/ Minnesota Public Radio also polled 625 active voters at the same time as the Minnesota Poll. It found Coleman with 47 percent of the support and Mondale with 41 percent, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 points. The difference between the polls suggests an electorate in tremendous flux but also could be the result of different polling methods."

You read it here first: the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll adjusts its survey results according to formulas "verified" in past elections; the Pioneer Press poll is conducted by the Mason-Dixon organization using traditional methods in which it identifies "likely voters" and tabulates their preferences. (The PP Mason-Dixon poll uses a smaller sample than the Minnesota Poll; the PP poll undoubtedly has to contact as many registered voters as the Strib Minnesota Poll, but the PP weeds out unlikely voters.)

One more critical point from the Strib story regarding the aftershocks of the Wellstone death rally: "Poll results show the backlash from the service, which was broadcast live on radio and TV, may make its mark on the election's outcome. Nearly a quarter of the 929 likely voters said the service made them more likely to vote for Coleman, while 16 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Mondale. An additional 53 percent said the service will make no difference in how they vote."

Here is the comparable point in the Pioneer Press story: "According to the Pioneer Press-Minnesota Public Radio poll, 17 percent of the sample said their choice in the Senate race was 'influenced' by Tuesday night's memorial service. And most of those voters went to Coleman, a group that could account for some of his lead in the poll, Coker said. 'I think this memorial service was just a real turning point,' he said."

At this point, dear readers, we report, you decide.

Speaking of politically correct whitewashing, check out this column in the Washington Post by Democratic Congressmen John Lewis and Martin Frost called "Blacks and Jews Together." These two out-of-touch Democrats sniff that "after two of our African American colleagues lost primary elections recently, some commentators -- and many Republicans cynically pursuing thier own partisan interests -- claimed a growing rift between" Jews and African Americans. Now where did these commentators get such an idea? Was it because extensive Jewish support helped sink the two "African American colleagues" -- Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard -- both of whom were pro-Palestinian and thus the beneficiaries of substantial donations from Arab and Muslim sources? Was it because McKinney's father, himself a prominent Democratic politician, blamed his daughter's political troubles on the "J-E-W-S?" Was it because the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Eddie Bernice Johnson, complained that "Jewish people are attempting to pick our leaders?" Nope. It was just those cyncial Republican pursuing their own partisan interests.

Lewis and Frost suggest that black support for Palestinians should not bother Jews, since it is merely the natural outgrowth of "a long and distinguished tradition of non-violence in the African American community," which naturally spills over into the desire to promote peace in the Middle East. Huh? Is Arafat the heir of Martin Luther King? Did Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard pursue peace in Kashmir, Bosnia, or Angola? Why were they fixated on coercing Israel into making concessions to its violent enemies? Perhaps Mr. McKinney has the answer -- "J-E-W-S."

The New York Times can't even be relied on to report accurately on its own polls. Andrew Sullivan, for one, has skewered the Times for repeatedly mischaracterizing its own data. Today the headline reads, "In Poll, Americans Say Both Parties Lack Clear Vision." Well, sort of. Actually, the New York Times/CBS News poll data indicate that by a 42% to 39% margin, Americans think Republicans do have a clear plan for the country, while by a 49% to 31% margin, the Democrats do not have a clear plan. But, hey, who's counting? It's only a poll. The generic Congressional preference question also favored the Republicans by an unusually wide seven point margin, 47% to 40%. I don't attach much significance to this finding; nothing has happened in the past few days to cause that much of a swing toward the Republicans. (Most of the polling was completed before Tuesday's Wellstone fiasco.) It does provide some assurance, however, that the Democrats' last-ditch attacks haven't been very effective.

I hope our readers took time out from the election coverage to read Daniel Pipes' Jihad and the Professors, posted by Trunk yesterday morning. Pipes demonstrates how members of the professoriate across the United States are telling anyone who will listen that "jihad is a struggle without arms," a "constant struggle of Muslims to conquer their inner base instincts, to follow the path to God, and to do good in society." Pipes also demonstrates that, in fact, to most Muslims jihad means what it has always meant -- "the compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims."

Bat Ye'or is another historian who will not whitewash the concept of jihad. She has shown that, when it comes to non-Muslims, jihad leads to bloodshed and servitude, not the brotherhood of man. In this column in the Washington Times, Diana West describes how Muslims jeered Ye'or at a recent Georgetown University conference. Worse, the student organizers of the conference apologized to the Muslim community for staging the event. It seems clear that, in West's words, "decades of political correctness and cultural relativism" have brought us to the point that academia feels compelled to reject, on doctrinal grounds, "the historical testiimony of millions of human victims of jihad," including several thousand American victims.

The Minnesota Republican Party prepared an anti-Mondale TV ad that apparently was quite hard-hitting. It showed Mondale with Carter and reminded voters of 21% interest and home mortgage rates, 10% unemployment, and hostages held in Iran. It was intended mainly, I suppose, to remind voters who know Mondale's name but have forgotten the details of his career, how disastrous it was. At the eleventh hour, however, the party pulled the ad. It apparently will never see the light of day. We are trying to determine whether this decision was based on fear of a backlash against "negative campaigning"--it's always negative campaigning when you remind voters about a Democrat's record in office--or whether the party believes that the reaction to the Wellstone pep rally, together with Mondale's anticipated participation in a debate, will carry Coleman to victory without having to "go negative." Whatever the party's reasoning was, I hope they're right. It would be very painful if Mondale were to be elected to the Senate without an effort being made to remind voters that when he was active in public life twenty to thirty years ago, he was wrong on every major issue of the time.

And, since I posted a photo of Norm Coleman below, here is one of Mondale, campaiging with Democratic gubernatorial nominee Roger Moe. Note the Wellstone signs and buttons.

OK, here is the news on the Coleman/Mondale debate, from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The debate will be Monday morning at 10:00 a.m.; it will be televised as well as broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio. The debate will be between Coleman and Mondale only; the two minor party candidates, thankfully, will not participate. The terms of the debate reflect a compromise between the two campaigns. Mondale has tried to push the debate as far toward election day as possible to minimize its impact; he succeeded in that. Mondale wanted to be on radio but not television; he failed on that point, since the debate will be televised. Of course, few people will be able to watch it at 10:00 in the morning, but the station broadcasting it has announced that it will allow any other television station to rebroadcast the debate later in the day. Mondale had wanted all four parties to be present to dilute the event and, frankly, to make it less serious, as last night's event was. He lost on this point. So: we are left with a two-man debate which will be re-broadcast on television the night before the election. This result reflects a parity of bargaining power between the two campaigns; Mondale would have refused to debate altogether if he had thought he could get away with it. It seems likely that the debate will be the decisive event in the campaign. Unless we are greatly mistaken, the polls that come out over the next forty-eight hours will show a dead heat. It is reasonable to think that the debate--more specifically, the public's perception of Mondale after eighteen years out of the spotlight--will sway enough votes to determine the outcome.
Everyone in Minnesota knows what Norm Coleman looks like, but for the benefit of our readers around the country (and the world, Oxblog for one has linked to us and shown a great deal of interest in this campaign), here is a photo of Norm. His wife Laurie is visible in the background.

From the front lines, our faithful reader Gene Allen reports that he visited Coleman headquarters this morning. According to Gene, the tickets to all Bush events were gone; the place was buzzing with folks seeking Coleman bumper stickers and lawn signs. I am as clueless as any outsider regarding what is really happening, but Gene's report suggests to me that Republicans may have been energized by the death rally at least as much as the DFL Wellstone wackos.

Hugh Hewitt is in town for a couple of days, broadcasting live from 1280 AM The Patriot; the Trunk and I were on his show this morning discussing Minnesota politics. It is clear from talking to callers that the fallout from the Democrats' Wellstone pep rally on Tuesday continues. We have still not seen any poll data that would tell us the magnitude of the backlash, but anecdotally it appears to be huge. I'm not sure he's right, but Hugh believes that voters around the country were so put off by the death rally that races in Arizona and Missouri have been affected. Stay tuned; we will post and analyze both publicly available and private polls as their results come in. Many thanks to Hugh for the opportunity to appear on his show and for his support of Power Line!

With the Labor Party's exit from the Israeli government, many expect Ariel Sharon to become more hard-line in dealing with the Palestinians, now that his government is dependent on "far-right" political parties to maintain a parliamentary majority. Gerald Steinberg of the Financial Times doubts that this will happen. He believes that, while the Palestinians would like Sharon to become more aggressive, Sharon will resist in order to maintain good relations with the United States. Steinberg thinks that, if necessary, Sharon will call new elections, win them, and then form a new coalition government through which he can continue his current "intermediate-line" policies. I agree with Steinberg's conclusion but am less sanguine about the efficacy of a policy that avoids tough action in order to placate the U.S. State Department. If Steinberg is right, the Palestinians will escalate their terrorism in the hope that, without the Labor Party to restrain him, Sharon will take action that will gain sympathy for Arafat. While Sharon must be mindful of the views of President Bush, he must also be mindful that, as Barry Goldwater would say, moderation in the fight against terrorists is no virtue.

Our friends at Real Clear Politics report the following poll numbers. In Missouri, Talent (R) 50 percent, Carnahan (D) 46 percent. In Colorado, Allard (R) 41 percent, Strickland (D) 40 percent. In Georgia, Cleland (D) 48 percent, Chambliss (R) 45 percent. The number of "undecideds" in Colorado this close to the election is astonishing. As I noted yesterday, the conventional wisdom is that most "undecideds" vote for the challenger, in this case Strickland. Michael Barone thinks that this won't be the case in Colorado because the undecided voters are mostly Republicans who have recently arrived in the state and don't know Allard yet. A third possibility, I suppose, is that the "undecideds" simply won't vote in large numbers.

The Mondale Rope-a-Dope: Just as Fritz Mondale was approaching the end of his service as a Minnesota senator, Muhammad Ali was perfecting the rope-a-dope boxing strategy that he employed with great effect against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. Ali's rope-a-dope involved his covering his face with his fists and inclining back against the ropes, conserving his energy while his opponent flailed away at him. The Mondale rope-a-dope takes this strategy one step further, requiring the contender to lean against the ropes alone in a ring at least 100 miles away from the match. Brilliant! Hey, he can't lose if he's not there. The Washington Times has an excellent account of last night's match in "Mondale doesn't show at debate."

Justice Page speaks: Consistent with our own analysis and disparagement of Robert Novak's Thursday column on the alleged expression of interest by Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page in succeeding to the candidacy of Senator Wellstone, Justice Page has issued a statement denying the accuracy of the column. We believe him. The Pioneer Press story is "Page says column was inaccurate."

The Minnesota Senate candidates, less Walter Mondale, debated tonight on a local television station. Three candidates appeared: Norm Coleman; a relatively presentable Independence Party candidate that no one has ever heard of; and a bizarre, elderly, under-dressed Green Party nominee. Mondale's absence was commented upon, but the other candidates didn't pound on him as hard as they could have. Coleman did a good job, but the debate was so rinky-dink, from its production values to two of its participants, that I was tempted to credit Mondale with good judgment for staying away. Having seen Mondale interviewed a couple of times, it is easy to see why he is ducking debates with Coleman. Mondale looks old and surprisingly frail; he speaks slowly, even haltingly, and seems to have aged well beyond his 74 years. Mondale has said that he will participate in one debate, but Coleman has not yet been able to pin him down to a time or location. A news broadcast tonight said that Mondale might consider Minnesota Public Radio an acceptable host. A radio debate would favor Mondale since listeners would not be able to see the obvious contrast in vigor and energy between him and Coleman. In the meantime, the mainstream media have treated Mondale's entry into the campaign as a news story, so that instead of answering hostile questions from interviewers, he has been the subject of prime-time puff pieces. So Mondale's entry into the race has been smoothed as much as possible. Nevertheless, I suspect that so far, the main reaction of most Minnesotans has been surprise at how old and frail Mondale has become.

I love this story from the Washington Post about a rally for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend attended by Al Gore. Apparently equating his defeat in 2000 with Pearl Harbor and assassination of JFK, Gore asked the folks whether they remembered where they were when the Supreme Court pulled the plug on his Florida recount. According to the Post, "dozens of hands shot up," meaning that hundreds did not. The narcissistic former VP then urged the crowd to channel its outrage over his defeat into Townsend's faltering Maryland gubernatorial campaign. Then it was Townsend's turn. She began by telling the rally at predominantly black Bowie State University that "it's great to be here at Coppin State University," a different predominantly black school.

Less than a year ago, Townsend was running 15 points ahead of opponent Bob Ehrlich in the polls, and was being touted as a possible Vice Presidential candidate in 2004. Today she trails Ehrlich by 4 points. This article helps explain why. As I said last week, this may be that rare election in which, as Michael Dukakis once said, the primary issue is competence, not ideology.

Ann Coulter takes on two of her favorite targets, the New York Times and the "religion of peace."

For those who missed it, here's Charles Krauthammer's column on the ludicrous negotiations between Colin Powell and the French that threaten to nullify our right to take meaningful action against Saddam Hussein. As Krauthammer concludes, "Why we should agree to [the French conditions] is beyond me. Why is Colin Powell even negotiating them? And why does the president, who is pledged to disarming Hussein one way or another, allow Powell even to discuss a scheme that is guaranteed to leave Saddam Hussein's weapons in place?"

Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne presents a characteristically misleading piece about the judge confrimation process. As regular readers of Power Line know, we are all lawyers and we have followed with interest and disgust the all too successful efforts of Senate Democrats to prevent President Bush's nominees to the federal bench from being voted up or down by the full Senate. By killing the nominations in committee, the Democrats not only prevent the President's nominees from being confirmed, they protect most Democratic Senators from having to go on record and vote them down. Of course, this leaves the federal judiciary badly understaffed, but this is of no concern to the Democrats. Nor does it matter to the Democrats that most of the blocked nominees are highly qualified individuals, according to the American Bar Association and to distinguished attorneys, both liberal and conservative. We at Power Line have documented a number of such instances.

President Bush has proposed a plan whereby federal judges would give a year's notice before retiring so that the process to replace them could start early. A series of deadlines for the White House and Senate would then follow, leading to a floor vote within 180 days of a given nomination. Dionne asserts that these changes "move in exactly the wrong direction." His rationale is that the Bush plan does not call for the Senate to provide any advice on who should be nominated. But no president has ever been required by law to consult with the Senate before nominating judges. Dionne points to the "advise and consent" language of the Constitution. Yet this language also applies to appointing cabinet members. Does anyone expect the president to consult with members of the opposition party in the Senate before nominating a Secretary of State? Dionne has deliberately missed the point. The Bush plan is a method of obtaining a timely vote on judicial nominees, necessitated by Democratic stalling tactics. The president can maximize his chances of prevailing on the vote by consulting with the opposition or he can take the risk of not doing so. That choice should be the president's.

Dionne advocates a plan whereby the president and the Senate would agree on balanced slates of judges representing the liberal, conservative, and moderate points of view. He pretends to think that this sort of horse-trading is appropriate when there is divided government. But there has been divided government for most of the past 34 years. The only thing that's new in 2002 is that the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have essentially gone on strike. That is insufficient reason for the president to give up a prerogative he has exercised since the founding of the Republic.

In his role as shill for the Senate Democrats, Dionne makes a number points that are highly misleading. First, he equates the Republican Senate's stalling on some of Clinton's final appointees with what the Democrats are doing now. For years, outgoing presidents from both parties have had difficulty getting nominees confirmed. But no newly elected president, regardless of his margin of victory, has ever had that problem. I don't have the figures handy, but I've seen them. The confirmation rate for Clinton's nominees is comparble to those of President Reagan and the first President Bush, and vastly exceeds the rate of the current Presdent Bush. Second, Dionne, posing once again as the voice of moderation and reason, suggests that ideologically balanced courts are desirable in their own right. Does anyone recall Dionne (or any liberal) making this point during the eight years when the Democrats controlled the nomination process? I certainly don't. In any event, after eight years of Clinton-appointed judges the best way to restore balance to the judiciary is to allow well-qualified Bush nominees to be confirmed, even if they are mainstream conservatives. But that will happen only if the Republicans take back control of the Senate in Tuesday's election.

More on the Wellstone death rally (a/k/a the Mondale campaign): Walter Mondale has been associated with so many fiascos, extending back so far in time, that one almost needs to be a professional historian to be aware of them all. Given the relative recency of the events, however, we should not forget the extent to which Mondale undertook the role of butt boy for Bill Clinton: he was a butt boy for Clinton to such an extent that he should properly be deemed, in the parlance of Little Trunk, an "ass clown."

In 1996 when Bill Clinton was immersed in the campaign finance scandals that all by themselves should have destroyed him, he called on Walter Mondale to provide politcal cover for him as the head of a commission on campaign finance reform. Rocket Man and I wrote a piece in which we tried to capture some of the comedy and irony involved in this scenario. By popular demand (my own), I am reposting the piece for whatever current interest and relevance it may have. The piece was originally published in the Washington Times and the Star Tribune in 1997. The piece is "Fritz '56: The Young Mondale's Reflections on Campaign Finance Reform."

More on the Wellstone death rally: Tuesday evening's death rally, that is. D.J. Tice is an editorial writer and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He is our favorite Minnesota journalist, period. D.J. makes an interesting point about the remarkable Star Tribune "get over it" editorial that we posted yesterday, "The Speech/Straying from memorial to rally."

According to the Strib editorial, Rick Kahn's revolting imprecation of Republican senators to join in defeating Norm Coleman in his race for the senate "[was] such an emotional fantasy -- and so not in keeping with the actual Wellstone legacy -- that it could only have come from a person racked with grief and pain."

D.J. writes us that the Star Tribune editorial reflects an important new insight into the grieving process: "The new Stages of Grief: 1) Denial, 2) Anger, 3) Bargaining, 4) Rabble-rousing.

"I guess liberals have befuddled people about so many things that they think they can even deceive them about a universal human experience. Let anyone who has ever suffered surpassing grief answer for himself: Did you, at any 'stage' of mourning, feel an irresistible impulse to insult and demean people who had come to pay respects to the one you loved?"

The excellent Victor Davis Hanson on "al Qaedism." This is the term Hanson uses to describe those who, though not part of al Qaeda, commit acts of terrorism out of sympathy with al Qaeda and/or radical Islamic fundamentalism. As Hanson notes, one did not need to be a formal follower of Hitler to be fascistic, or a member of Stalin's party to be communistic. And the al Qaedists can be as dangerous as actual members of al Qaeda cells. Hanson concludes that "to rid us of al Qaedists, we must first not merely destroy al Qaeda, but do so in such comprehensive and humiliating fashion that the easy emulation of the radical Islamicist agenda not only draws opposition from friends and family but utter ridicule." In addition, says Hanson, although we cannot "censor" those who express sympathy with the radical Islamic fundamentalism, we should surely "censure" them.

The Minnesota Democratic Party has sent out an "Urgent Update" to potential contributors, stating that the party "is in a cash flow crisis" and asking for an "urgent contribution" to the party to support the Mondale campaign.

Here is the latest on the South Dakota voter fraud scandal. It has been determined that one Democratic operative alone turned in "many hundreds of absentee ballot applications" on which she had forged the signature of the purported applicant. In addition, investigators have recovered the charred remnants of additional absentee ballot applications which the same Democratic operative had burned.

While control of the Senate and the House is up for grabs, everyone seems to agree that, following Tuesday's elections, Democrats will constitute a majority of the nation's governors. Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute does not dispute this, but finds solace in the fact that Republicans will win in at least three of the big-four states -- Texas, Florida, New York, and maybe California. Moore hopes that Governor Pataki's third term will resemble his first, when he was still a tax-cutter. As I noted several days ago, this is a forlorn hope given the promises Pataki has made to big labor. But Moore is pleased that several genuine conservatives are poised to win, notably Mark Sanford in South Carolina who wants to repeal that state's income tax. Finally, Moore predicts a victory for Bob Ehrlich in Maryland. That would make Ehrlich the first Republican governor here since Spiro Agnew, who won in 1966 by running to the left of his maverick opponent as a Rockefeller Republican.

More on the Wellstone death rally: Lost in the campaign coverage is a related item from today's Star Tribune that is weird beyond immediate comment, "Pilot of Wellstone flight had felony record."

More on the Wellstone death rally: Tuesday evening's death rally, that is. How could I have missed this? Courtesy of our friends at RealClearPolitics, we submit for your consideration today's New York Post editorial, "Minnesota Meldown."

Time out for this message: Hot off the press, courtesy of the Daniel Pipes e-mail distribution list, is his article in the November issue of Commentary, "Jihad and the Professors."

Last night on Fox News, Michael Barone had an encouraging take on the Colorado Senate race. As we noted earlier this week, the most recent poll had Republican incumbent Wayne Allard leading Democrat Tom Strickland by 41 percent to 39 percent. These numbers are generally regarded as bad news for Allard because undecided voters usually tend to vote for the less known challenger. However, Barone thinks the Colorado race is an exception. He notes that Colorado has a large number of voters who are new to the state, and that these voters tend to be Republicans (I think they are mostly refugees from California). Barone suggests that the large number of undecided voters is less the result of reservations about Allard than a reflection of the fact that the new voters don't know Allard very well. Barone thinks that these new voters will tend to vote for Allard in the end due to party loyalty. Barone also sees Allard gaining momentum and went so far as to predict a Republican victory in that race.

Blogger James Lileks brilliantly lays bare the hypocrisy of Walter Mondale's faux-populist campaign. He is utterly devastating; I only wish the voters had more than five days for the facts about Mondale's candidacy to sink in.

More on the Wellstone death rally: Tuesday evening's death rally, that is. Courtesy of our friends at RealClearPolitics