† Rage Against … Whatever: For the first couple of weeks, Occupy Wall Street, the “leaderless resistance movement” that is clueless about what it is resisting, had "little edge or urgency" and "has nowhere to go," noted Charles Blow. The New York Times columnist was eagerly anticipating the participation of union goons to show these slackers how it's done. Left to their own devices, their plan was to ineffectually protest whatever ... until whenever – remember, this is the generation that got trophies just for showing up. Oh, and it appears the “revolution” will be televised now that a trendy, high-end PR firm has volunteered its, um, corporate services.

† Romney: The Sequel (updates eighth item on the page): On FOX News Sunday, former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain differentiated his business experience from former MA Gov. Mitt Romney's this way:

[T]he differences between Mitt Romney claiming to try to be the businessman in the race, is that his business appearance has been Wall Street. My business experience has been Main Street. I knew what a pizza looked like before it was kicked [sic; Cain said "cooked"] and served. I've got my hands dirty working on Main Street and work in business rather than just on Wall Street.

More on Romney's business record while he ran MA from The New York Times, which reports that shortly after taking office he levied $110 million in new corporate taxes and over the next three years “relentlessly scoured the tax code for more loopholes, extracting hundreds of millions of corporate dollars to help close budget gaps”:

Mr. Romney’s campaign against the tax loopholes, like no other period in his career, put him at odds with the values and expectations of the corporate world from which he came. Today, in seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Romney promotes himself as the pro-business candidate who understands what companies need and how to create jobs.

Romney backed off his tax enforcement strategy only when he started laying the groundwork for a possible presidential run and wanted to tamp down criticism from conservative groups.

† BHO Blooper Reel (updates second item on page): Many a husband and boyfriend has (deservedly) gotten into hot water by calling his wife or girlfriend by another woman's name. But President Barack Hussein Obama called his wife, Michelle, "Michael," reports American Thinker:

Note that the president was addressing Admiral Mike Mullen and his wife, Deborah, and then speaks of "Michael and I" acknowledging the service of the Mullens' son Jack, "deployed today." "Michael and I" cannot refer to the president and the Admiral.
 

In addition to the obvious reason for the gaffe – there was a typo on the teleprompter that Obama robotically read instead of making a real time correction – American Thinker speculates it is within the realm of possibility that Obama blanked on his wife’s name, is cheating on her with a man named Michael, or Michelle actually has changed her name to Michael (in which case The Stiletto wonders if she got inspired by Chastity Bono’s name change to Chaz).

† Affirmative Action Is Antithetical To A True Meritocracy: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) once observed that then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) – who wasn't using his middle name back then, and neither were "racists" – could be a viable presidential candidate because he had "no negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," and pundits have pointed out that when he "wanted to" he used non-standard English to connect with his black base (updates ninth item on page). But Harvard-educated lawyer and grammar consultant William Proctor, who studied over 3,000 pages of Obama’s official speeches and remarks, says he is "grammatically challenged" – and his shaky grasp of standard English is not necessarily an affectation that can be turned on and off. The Washington Times reports:

“His speeches reveal that at this point, he is simply not in the same rhetorical-grammatical league as a Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Proctor says.

Along these lines, an article in American Thinker deconstructs a letter written by Obama in November 1990, when he was president of the Harvard Law Review:

Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens doesn’t think much of Obama’s verbal skills, either (“Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché?”). Stephens calls Obama out on his “insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting – whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time – that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.”

† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: A new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that only 37 percent expect President Barack Hussein Obama to win re-election, WLS (890 AM, Chicago) reports:

A majority of Americans [55 percent] expect Barack Obama to be a one-term president …

It’s a challenging finding for the president because expectations can fuel voter enthusiasm – precisely the ingredient that led the GOP to its broad success in the 2010 midterms, when charged-up conservatives turned out while dispirited Democrats stayed home.

Democrats do expect Obama to win, but they say so only by 58-33 percent -- a comparatively tepid vote of confidence within his own party. Republicans, by contrast, smell victory by a vast 83-13 percent. Independents by 54-36 percent expect the Republican candidate to beat Obama.

Another ominous sign for the president: Obama’s home state advantage in IL is slowly shrinking as his poll numbers continue to sink there, particularly amongst men and independents (52 percent of both groups disapprove of his job performance), as well as whites (53 percent disapprove).

One danger of being poll-driven is that you live and die by the polls, and even Obama is now thinking of himself as the “underdog” of the 2012 campaign.

† Bachmann Becomes A Back Bencher: Michele Bachmann's candidacy has “sputtered”  as recent events in IA “have drawn low turnouts” and her campaign has gone begging for "emergency" contributions from supporters, Los Angeles Times reports:

Top Republicans neutral in the race say she squandered opportunities to build on her win and are baffled by the decisions her campaign is making, notably limiting most of her campaigning to Waterloo and the large cities of Des Moines, Ames and Cedar Rapids.

"She's a great candidate but has turned into a really bad campaigner," said one longtime Iowa GOP operative who spoke anonymously to preserve relations with the campaign. …

At an event in Cedar Rapids, aides handed out leftover brochures asking for support at the straw poll, more than a month ago. A strong presence in early Republican debates, she was starved of airtime in recent face-offs, to the point that during the last one she interrupted so she could answer another candidate's question.

Meanwhile, Ed Goeas, Bachmann’s top pollster, announced he is leaving her presidential campaign.

† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually (updates fourth item on the page): Gallup has found a 13-point “intensity gap” between Republicans and Democrats – the largest since 2000 – that could signal a “major political upheaval,” Washington Post political handicapper Chris Cillizza reports:

The data showed that just 45 percent of Democrats say they are more enthusiastic about the 2012 presidential election than they have been in past elections, while 44 percent described themselves as less enthusiastic.

Nearly six in 10 Republicans (58 percent), on the other hand, call themselves more enthusiastic about voting in 2012 than in past contests, while just 30 percent say they are less excited.

The disparity between Democratic and Republican enthusiasm is … a major departure from the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats held an intensity advantage of 40 points or more.

Steven Law, the head of American Crossroads, a large, conservative-aligned outside interest group, said, “The intensity surge on our side is new since the spring and almost 100 percent focused on Obama.”

And when it comes to the get-out-the-vote effort, homeschoolers may be to Repubs what union workers are to Dems. “With a national grassroots network and a tradition of activism, conservative Christian homeschoolers are among the most enthusiastic volunteers a Republican can hope for,” Reuters reports:

Four years ago, homeschoolers helped push Mike Huckabee to a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses over Mitt Romney's better-funded, better organized campaign.

This time around, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum proudly point out that they homeschooled their own children, while Ron Paul touts himself as a "homeschooling champion" on his campaign Web site. Rick Perry proclaimed an official "homeschool week" as governor of Texas, and Herman Cain joined other candidates at a homeschool conference earlier this year.

So far, no candidate has emerged as the favorite – in part because so many fit the bill.

The candidates are not just after votes. They need volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and persuade neighbors to leave their warm houses in the middle of winter to sit through an often-lengthy caucus process.

† Is It Too Soon To Discuss The “I Word”?: In its excellent recap of an “exhaustive” July report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report” on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms program “Fast and Furious,” The Christian Science Monitor wrote:

[T]he report alleges that the operation – which one US official has called "a perfect storm of idiocy" – likely allowed hundreds of powerful guns to cross into Mexico, possibly changing the outcome of cartel battles with Mexican police, leading to the deaths of many Mexicans and one federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and damaging diplomatic relations between the US and Mexico.

The Fast and Furious scandal is still playing out, with hearings in the House Oversight Committee …  Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California says he is intent on finding out how high in the Obama administration knowledge of the operation went.

The Obama Justice Department has been stonewalling Issa’s investigation, but the administration finally released a trove of documents that suggest a second gunrunning operation in TX, New York Post reports:

We’ve also just learned from documents that guns linked to Fast and Furious turned up in El Paso last year – the first time such weapons have surfaced outside Arizona, where the guns were “released.” A convicted drug felon was allowed to buy 40 AK-47-type rifles, which eventually wound up in Texas. …

A White House under investigation can delay, slow-walk documents, redact them in the name of national or operational security, and simply refuse to make witnesses available to investigators – all of which the administration has done. Issa and Grassley had asked to interview O’Reilly before the end September, but the White House says he’s on assignment in the Mideast and thus unavailable.

Summing up the toll of Fast and Furious – two, possibly three dead agents and more than 200 dead Mexicans – the Post asks, “why?” Perhaps the Obama administration was intent on “proving” that gun dealers were illegally funneling guns to Mexico so that they could be vilified – and by extension, their customers, so as to turn public opinion against private gun ownership. The problem was, the ATF had to force law-abiding gun dealers to break the law in order to carry out the administration's assault on our Second Amendment rights.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: George Mason University economics professor Donald Boudreaux recently wondered what would happen if “groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education” (fifth item on page). Here is another thought experiment by NFL Hall of Fame QB Fran Tarkenton based on the premise, “what if the NFL played by teachers' rules?” and “[e]ach player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league” with the same pay scale used “for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster” and “if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct”:

The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: The Annals of Improbable Research awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel in Medicine to a group of researchers from the U.S. and Australia for their paper, “The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,” The Providence Journal reports:

“[H]olding it” has effects similar to drinking small amounts of alcohol or going without sleep for 24 hours. …

[In the experiment] eight healthy adults … consumed 250 milliliters of water every 15 minutes and then took tests measuring cognitive function at hourly intervals. As the urge to void and associated pain increased, attention and working memory got worse.

[Researcher Peter J. Snyder] says the study also has practical applications by showing the importance of bathroom breaks for many professions, such as long-distance truckers, airline pilot, nurses and teachers.

“The level of cognitive impairment, when you are really in pain and need to go to the bathroom, is not trivial but is quite important, particularly if you need to make rapid decisions,” Snyder says.