Maggie's Farm

The right places to be in New England on a November weekend (preferably with gun and dog).

Deirdre McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, has a new book: Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

Anchoress discusses Palin.

Love is not enough. (Not enough reason to vote for somebody)

Global Geoengineering Moratorium

Good to see a hint of sanity

Minorities in College---Good News, But... It's a comment on a report. One quote:

 On some of the measures used in the study, whites lag behind Asian-Americans by about as much as Blacks and Latinos are behind whites. If our institutions of higher education have a duty to equalize Black and Latino achievement with that of whites, why not set their goals higher still? Why not figure out how to bring whites up to the level of Asian-Americans, and make this loftier level the aim for African-Americans and Hispanics as well? The answer is obvious. Had the authors contemplated this problem, they would inevitably have had to probe the differences in family values, family structure, and family socioeconomic status that explain Asian educational success. And that would have required them to consider how much these variables shape the performance of black and Latino students as well.

And why not quit categorizing us by skin tone and eye shape? We're beyond that form of racism. When we read about California schools limiting the numbers of Asians they accept, one realizes that this is all absurd. Furthermore, is my friend from Spain Hispanic? Is Obama white or black? Time to end this nonsense.

Obama: U.S. can't afford two years of gridlock

Yes We Can.

Krauthammer agrees that the election was just a return to the norm. A quote:

Nor should Republicans overinterpret their Tuesday mandate. They received none. They were merely rewarded for acting as the people's proxy in saying no to Obama's overreaching liberalism. As one wag put it, this wasn't an election so much as a restraining order.

The Republicans won by default. And their prize is nothing more than a two-year lease on the House. The building was available because the previous occupant had been evicted for arrogant misbehavior and, by rule, alas, the House cannot be left vacant.

I think Dr. K underestimates the force and speed of this return to normal.

The economy: Gridlock's not enough. A quote:

The problem is that Obamanomics has placed the US economy in a hole so deep that it will take more than easy money coupled with political gridlock to fix. To lower unemployment in a meaningful way, Washington needs to unwind the trillions of new debt, higher taxes and new mandates that it's given us over the last two years. The GOP's gains this week aren't enough to make that happen.

How do I know this? It's the assessment made by just about every businessman I spoke to before and after Tuesday's voting. (Almost no one speaks on the record these days, for fear of political retribution. But that's another column.)

Stratfor on the election, via SDA

Image above from post at Watts.

All sane people hope for globalistical warmening. It's too darn cold.

Litotes? Litotes.

FOF: Avoiding and Ending an Affair

ROBERT GIBBS: Efforts to repeal ObamaCare won’t get past the Senate. That’s okay. Make ‘em vote for it again.

It could be—it seems just possible—that the “truth and science and facts” that these Democrats talk about are really only schoolhouse theories that have no bearing on reality; that they are tried-and-failed progressive fairy tales that could only continue to be believed by people who have spent most of their adult lives glued face-first to the public tit. It’s possible that the best-informed populace in history has risen up in a truly spontaneous grassroots movement deeply connected to the nation’s founding principles and prudently given the heave-ho to a bunch of spendthrift, incompetent, supercilious, and self-deceived buffoons who mistook their college degrees for wisdom.

Somebody is crazy angry: Tim Wise at Daily Kos (h/t. Q&O)

I think this guy wants to have me shot. Make my day, weenie. He cannot wait for the demise of the USA - and says so. Where does this sort of anger come from?

For a moment, I thought somebody photoshopped Obama into this Drudge pic:

Readers will be happy to know that we replaced our old server today:

A reader reminded me that David Horowitz really liked Kenyon College.

If David likes something, I like it.

h/t, Coyote:

Bag of uncounted ballots discovered in Bridgeport.

Sounds like Bridgeport. They always have bags of stuff, when needed.

Powerline: Annals of the welfare state

E-mail shows illegal activity in Reid's campaign

What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas.

Bishop Tutu and "Israeli Apartheid"

Krauthammer's take at NRO. Electric cars?

Somebody told me yesterday that electric cars will save the human race from extinction because they have no emissions. What can you say to people like that? I am not kidding: She said electricity comes from the wall outlets. College-educated.

Democrats have to be more competitive in states that don�t touch an ocean if they want to bounce back.

Must be the toxic ozone from the salt water. Ban the oceans, along with the Happy Meals.

Driscoll: How the Gray Lady Became Margaret Dumont

Nancy Pelosi Seriously Considers Staying as Democratic Leader

Goody.

More good links later today, when I find the time to post them.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Toast and tea, we used to figger, was the final Communion - Brit-style.

When I was in high school, we all memorized Prufrock. Not because we had to, but because we liked to. As I always say, I define poetry as any writing which contains an inevitability of versification, with some coherence of imagery. Poetry is song-writing. I wish we had recordings of Kipling singing his poems. It would be a hoot, I am sure.

(We memorized things competitively when I was in high school. Shakespeare sonnets and soliloquies, lists of Chem equations and math theorems, Civil War dates and other historical dates. From all that I use 1569 today as one of my main ID codes (Shakespeare's birth year). Sophocles. Ozymandius. Kipling. Le Bateau Ivre. Paradise Lost. We had an official annual school tournament to see who could memorize the most lines of the opening of the Iliad, and another with the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original good Old English. Many folks would do 100-200 lines without faltering. The kids taking Latin, of course, had their famous and traditional speed declension contests. I even remember memorizing Babi Yar in Russian for kicks - and I spoke no Russian. It just sounded cool, imitating Yevtushenko's voice. Our hockey team specialized in the Iliad contest - somebody on the team always won. Our hockey coach also taught Ancient Greek. It was a point of honor for the team. A good high school, good fun. I hope high school kids still do amusing things like this. God knows what kids learn in college.) 

From an excellent piece on Eliot at Commentary, T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture:

Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot�s career strikes one today, at time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.

The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on �The Function of Criticism� in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people.

Read the whole thing. Eliot was a bank teller, of course - and a rock star. Still is a rock star, in my book. His stuff sticks like Velcro. Christ was his rock.

This one of my Sugar Maples is always bright orange in the autumn. Most of my others are always yellow, and some are in between. It's a mystery.

A spanking is what was administered to the Dems on Tuesday, minus (or not) the fun sado-masochistic eroticism. (Don't ever try to tell me that you've never had kinky thoughts.) Pic is from Vintage Spanking.

Still strange in CT - who won?

First they came for my Happy Meals...

"Soft tyranny"

TNR: The Gates Foundation's Delusional Techno-Messianism

GOP sweeps FL, wins Maine (!) governorship

Wins keep coming in

Harsanyi:

No matter what happens, for now, we can look forward to two glorious years of hyper-partisan acrimonious gridlock: Washington's most moral and productive state.

Gridlock is good.

Wherein Ace gets a taste of Politics 101

Opinion: Why Are Voters Only 'Angry' When They're Tossing Dems Out?

Well, who says it?

SDA: Bits you might have missed

Including Alabama

North Carolina: The strangest beast in all of politics

NRO: New York Wrap

As hopeless as CA

How did Harry Reid do it?

He won ugly.

Podhoretz: No time to celebrate- GOP remarkably sober at win

Us, too.

I love this stuff, testing your boat-handling skills against serious seas. I always loved to take my 23' cuddy cabin Sea Ox out after storms and hurricanes, for practice. The big following seas are the ones that frighten me. (h/t, Theo):

Image above stolen from Surber

Fred Barnes: The Republican Landslide

Wehner: Obama after the fall

Strange.

China's Christians: China could not silence 200 empty chairs in Capetown

Summary of governor's races.

CT's Tom Foley lost, by a Bridgeport.

Some Liberals Still Head Over Heels In Love With Obama

Being in love with a politician is a perversion.

Krauthammer: 'Obama Agenda is Dead,' 'He Tried a 2-Year Experiment in Hyper-Liberalism and the Country Has said No'. (Here's the good video)

Powerline: The trouble with California

Hopeless.

More attacks in Bagdad: Sunni vs. Shiite

Yes, they are mad about Gitmo and American Imperialism. Gotta bomb somebody, for Pete's sake, or your life will have no meaning.

Michelle: Moonbeam wins weirdest victory speech award

Sure sounds stoned. California is in good hands.

The Wrong Sort of Scepticism is a Crime against Humanity Says Penn State Prof

Sheesh. I'm a criminal against humanity. Shame on me.

Here.  It affects the Congressional race and the Governor's race.

It's lawyer time.

Ohio returned to its Republican roots yesterday. It's the Heartland.

That's a decent excuse to post one more of my Ohio pics from 2 weeks ago - the new Paul Newman Field House at Kenyon College. Fantastic for such a tiny college. Kenyon is strong in swimming.

The story is that alumnus Newman offered Kenyon a blank check for new theater and auditorium facilities. Kenyon said "Thanks - but we're good with the old stuff we have." So Newman asked "Well, then what can I do?"

Pic is Kristi Noem, gun-totin' Conservative who happily won in South Dakota.

Many races I feel good about (like Allen West and Dan webster in FL, Toomey in PA, etc), many I feel badly about (like Debicella losing in CT with a 50-50 result, and Sean Bielat's spanking by the horrible Barney). Angle was a lousy candidate, and it will be good fun to have Dingy Harry to kick around again. Summary of votes at RCP. 

I enjoyed this from Gateway:

Racist, sexist teabaggers have elected Marco Rubio, Susanna Martinez, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Bill Flores, Allen West, and...

Still, Eugene Robinson says it's about race and Obama.

Pitiful.

From Chantrill:

In the end, of course, it doesn't matter whether President Obama is a socialist, a crypto-socialist or a liberal.  From the point of view of the ordinary American it's a distinction without a difference.  Faced with a problem, President Obama will always opt for a solution that makes government bigger and Americans smaller.

Unfortunately for the president and his grand plan to transform America, the majority of the American people believe that the solution to our problems is to make the American people bigger and the government smaller.

Former President Bill Clinton - who presided over his own first-term electoral catastrophe in 1994 and is thus something of an expert on Republican landslide wins - denied this election is a referendum on the Obama agenda. "It. Is. A. Choice," he said. "A choice between two different sets of ideas." Well, obviously it's a choice; the people are simply choosing to reject the Democrats' ideas. Mr. Obama quipped, "The big difference here and in '94 was you've got me" - a point on which all sides can agree.

We will not be live-blogging, drunk-blogging, stoned-blogging, pajamas-blogging, nude-blogging, or otherwise reporting or commenting on election returns tonight.

Furthermore, we promise to post no profound statements about "what this election really means."

Mississippi floods are what maintain the delta. New Orleans itself is threatened by manmade river engireering - levees and canals.

It's the old Law of Unintended Consequences.

From Buddy -

I just voted. I enjoyed it.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land

Related: This Is America, Stupid! And it's not just the economy. It's the disrespect for the wishes of the electorate, who pay for everything. 

The elite without a country

Sharpton: Blacks Unemployed Because Of Racist Republicans

Al should write for The Onion

Chavez Says Venezuela's Golf Courses Should Be Seized, Put to Other Uses

Chavez should write for The Onion, too.

Tina Brown beclowns herself

She could write for The Onion too.

Was stimulus Barack Obama's 'original sin'?

Slaughter at Baghdad Church- 52 Murdered Including 3 Priests During Al-Qaeda Siege , and Churches Set Ablaze
in Russia's Muslim Caucasus

These perps obviously need better jobs, social workers, teachers with better pensions, and more understanding. Or are they just still mad about Gitmo?

MAINE FAMILY ROBINSON�S Top Ten The Hell With It, I�m Outta Here Movies

Somewhat related: The houseboat on the Pawcatuck River

 The �big dog� in campaign spending. Unions.

Who's Afraid of Marco Rubio?

Marco looks like a star. They always go after the potential stars, drive up their negatives or break their legs.

Americans are about to give Obama a bloody nose. Why? He just doesn't share their core values

My chimney sweep was here at noon (to check my flue after my fire on Friday). As he was scoping out my chimney and sending his brushes and vision device up there like a colonoscopy, he commented "I hope we send a clear message to Washington tomorrow."

He is retired career USMC. He still lifts and runs every day, and it is obvious. Oorah. His son is a SEAL.

(He has a very good business going - at $150 per chimney, he was booked up solid from August through December, and does a second round in Feb. for heavy users. His preferred customers have multiple chimneys. Like a dentist, he sends out reminder postcards to his people each July to make appointments. He has a deer- and turkey-hunting cabin on 200 acres up in West Nowhere, NY, has a modest life and doesn't really need the money, so he uses his income to bring his entire family, including grandkids, on one-month European trips every June. He rents a big house with a cook and housekeeper in a different place each year, flies the the folks over and back whenever they can get free to come, and rents cars for them. Last year, he did Scotland. In past years he has done a Greek island, Tuscany, the Czech Rep., Sweden. This June he plans on Sicily, which I told him I felt was an excellent choice). 

I said to this hearty, red-blooded American: "I think we will send a message, but who will be listening?"

Get your chimneys cleaned, Maggie's Farmers. We cannot afford to lose any readers in house fires.

More at Theo -

From the prior weekend. Big fields, especially compared with our small fields in New England. This is south of Gambier, near Homer.

Lots of Conservatives are excited about the elections tomorrow. It's this year's political World Series. With the numbers running for election, etc., a 45-seat Repub House pick-up would be fairly normal for a first midterm, so anything over that would be a big deal. I have no idea what to expect. All I know is that a wave-type Repub House victory will be like closing the barn door after the cows got out, and that it will be - and will be intended to be - a refudiation (thanks to Mrs. Palin for that handy neologism) of the Dem's national agenda.

Krauthammer:

Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them - such as repealing Obamacare - because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama's broad transformational agenda.

OCR Editorial: What Tuesday might mean

Politico: Grim Dems await huge House losses

WSJ: A Vote Against Dems, Not for the GOP

Only partly true, I think.

Democrats blaming the victims

They called us names

We don't like that.

Parker: Obama's missing sense of humor

Especially about himself.

Via Driscoll:

�Only one question remains � what area of the private sector � aside from the slip-and-fall attorneys � isn�t hated and vilified by the Obama Democrats?�

Realted from Gerson: Obama the snob

His politics, somebody told me, are those of "the typical upper class Liberal, Ivy-educated, suburban white woman." Well, I see more Alinsky than Escalade in the dude, but I might be wrong.

Barone's Obama's Economists Missed What Voters Plainly Saw

The line from the Obama camp is that voters are confused, ignorant, misled or even racist; they can't be rejecting the president's party on the merits. But voters, in rejecting the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of government, may be more sophisticated than their supposed betters. Leave the private sector alone, they seem to be saying, so it can recover from the financial crisis recession and once again create the bounteous and unscripted growth that has been the norm in American history.

WSJ: CBS Phone Recording Sets Off Firestorm in Alaska

This sort of thing has a history at CBS...

Dick Morris reviews Daniel Hannan's new book

Scare a Lefty tonight. She's a witch!

Body paint Halloween pics via Tiger

The killjoys come out on Halloween.

Has Boxer ever done anything useful? 

 The Looming Congressional Investigations

I want the truth out about how Fannie and Freddie - out of control government agencies - caused the financial mess.

City Journal: Already strong in New York, the Working Families Party looks to go national.

Unions Give More Campaign $$ To Dems Than Corporations To GOP

Government unions own the Dems

A bummer from Rick Moran: WHY THE GOP WILL PROBABLY FAIL

Saturday Night Card Game (Bill Maher Out Juan-Williamses Juan Williams, Media Silence Erupts)

Marco Rubio outshines Sarah Palin

The 20 most gerrymandered districts (h/t, reader)

Sinecures with no competition is the goal. No knowledge or skills required, great benefits, a sense of importance, and no heavy lifting or real world responsbility.

Obama appeals for an end to partisan politics � with a jab at GOP

France... "Spoiled and Selfish".... America's View

Inequality Statistics and Poverty Facts

Ronald Reagan was the Tea Party

He was. And even he could not shrink the leviathan.

Michelle:  The rise & resilience of conservative women

WSJ: Requiem for the Pelosi Democrats

Radical in the White House:

Katherine Lopez interviews Stanley Kurtz on his new book, Radical-in-Chief; as does Hugh Hewitt � who not too long ago would hang up on all the unserious rightwing �nutters� who intimated that Obama was a Marxist or socialist, in between shilling for whatever candidate the GOP establishment put forward.

Turns out that the evidence, largely circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless, suggests that Obama is a candidate trained in stealth socialism, both a product of � and culmination to � the New Left�s long march through the institutions. Of course, today the �New Left� self-identifies as �liberal� or �progressive,� to hide their socialist/Marxist roots. Their governing style is �pragmatic,� �forward thinking,� and �transformative�; and their message is one of economic populism, class warfare, and identity politics � all couched in the Orwellian inversions of protected groups, set-asides, government-approved speech, and the nannystate tentacles of a growing liberal fascism, into the (ironic) buzzwords �fairness� and �tolerance� and �security.�

Watts:

Reducing human CO2 emissions will likely have no measurable cooling effect on planetary temperatures.

Politico: Suburban nation, but urban policies

Pajamas: NPR and the Liberal Subculture that Worships It

Bunch of good stuff at Moonbattery