Little better illustrates that this administration has pretty much forgotten what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, than the idiotic publicity stunt it attempted in New York City Monday (4/27). Someone at the White House -- Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, has accepted responsibility -- thought it would be a swell idea to get a publicity photo of Air Force One flying low around the Statue of Liberty.  The New York City police, and the guy in the mayor's office who authorizes street fairs were informed of this, but were ordered to keep mum about it. It's bizarre enough that an administration which thinks nothing of making public explicit details of CIA interrogation techniques would deem it necessary to keep this publicity stunt secret.  But the bizarre is what characterizes this government. "I would call this felony stupidity," Fran Townsend, the White House adviser on homeland security during the Bush administration, told CNN yesterday (4/28).  She was talking of the Air Force One publicity stunt, but she could have been talking about the entire Obama White House.

As Archbishop of Canterbury (head of the Episcopal Church), William Laud (1573-1645) was a staunch political supporter of King Charles I, and an ecclesiastical supporter of "high church" practices.  Neither of these set well with Parliament, which was controlled by Puritans such as Oliver Cromwell.  So Parliament passed a law declaring Archbishop Laud guilty of treason, and had him beheaded. The law was called a bill of attainder.  Bills of attainder had two features.  First, they bypassed the courts in declaring someone guilty of a crime.  Second, they criminalized ex post facto actions that were not against the law at the time they were committed. For the obvious reasons, the American colonists were not fond of this aspect of the British legal system.  Which is why Article 1, section 9, clause 3 of the Constitution declares: "No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed." Barack Hussein Obama's apparent willingness to prosecute former Justice department lawyers who wrote memoranda opining that certain "enhanced interrogation techniques" were lawful suggests neither he nor his attorney general, Eric Holder, are familiar with the letter and spirit of Article 1, section 9, clause 3.

Barack Hussein Obama visited the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, today (4/20) in an apparent effort to mitigate the harm he did by making public the so-called "secret torture memos" which described in explicit detail the coercive interrogation techniques CIA officers used to obtain information from captured al Qaeda bigwigs. Release of the memoranda -- which were written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel or OLC between 2002 and 2005 -- was strongly opposed by the four previous CIA directors (two appointed by President George W. Bush, two appointed by President Clinton).  The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, did not object to the release in principle, but said the memoranda should have been heavily censored before being made public. The release of the memoranda means that we are unlikely ever again to get valuable information from terror suspects, because now our enemies know the precise lengths to which our interrogators are willing to go to coerce information, and that those limits stop well short of actually causing the terror suspect injury. Did Mr. Obama release the CIA memos for the purpose of achieving this result?

"The White House said the president is unaware of the tea parties and will hold his own event today," ABC's Dan Harris reported on the "Good Morning America" program the morning of April 15. This was, of course, a preposterous lie.  Mr. Obama may not approve of the Tea Party phenomenon, but he had to be aware of an event that drew hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of cities across the country.  But if the president is as clueless as his aides represented him to be to Mr. Harris, let's hope his foreign intelligence is better than his domestic intelligence is. The person most responsible for gathering domestic intelligence is the director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona who was a U.S. attorney before that.  She is not only wholly unqualified, she has now descended into creepy racism.

The opening stanza of the Marine Corps hymn is: "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea." The "Halls of Montezuma" refers to the assault on Chapultapec Castle on September 13, 1847 during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), by the small Marine contingent led by Captain Silas Casey in Gen. Winfield Scott's army.  Ninety percent of the officers and NCOs who led the assault were killed.  The red stripe on the dress uniform trousers of Marine officers is in commemoration of the blood their predecessors shed that day.  "To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the Marine role in Thomas Jefferson's war against the Barbary pirates.  Now we are faced with another war with pirates.  Will the current president learn any lesson from history?

All of us are brothers under the skin.  We humans (except, of course, for Republicans and AIG executives) all have good hearts, and we all want basically the same things.  Disputes between nations and cultures are chiefly the result of miscommunication, and can be resolved by compromise, concession, and "dialogue." That's a pleasant thing to believe, and many Americans - mostly wealthy liberals who've led sheltered lives - believe it.  But to sustain the belief requires a stupendous ignorance of history, whose blood-soaked pages reveal more disputes between nations and cultures have been driven by greed, envy, and religious zealotry than by miscommunication. "War started from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now," said Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, once al Qaeda's number three, as he confessed proudly last month his role in planning the 9/11 attacks and 30 others.  "It's never going stop killing of people.  This is life." It's uncomfortable to realize there are people in the world who want to kill you just because you are different from them, and will do so unless you kill them first.  But then, what characterizes a liberal is being uncomfortable with reality.

American International Group, an insurance company that has received about $180 billion in taxpayer funds, last week paid $165 million in bonuses to executives whose bad judgment is largely responsible for the financial mess we're in.  Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, wants the government to take back the bonuses.  This is a change of heart for Mr. Dodd, because it was he who inserted in the "stimulus" bill an amendment which specifically protected from restrictions on executive compensation "contractually obligated bonuses agreed on or before Feb. 11, 2009."  The amendment applied principally to AIG. Why might Sen. Dodd have been so solicitous of the welfare of the AIG execs?  Perhaps because last year he was the single largest recipient of contributions from American International Group's political action committee and its employees:  $103,100, according to opensecrets.org, which derived the information from Federal Elections Commission records.  The second largest recipient of AIG largesse?  Barack Obama, $101,332.  Chris Dodd is just another corrupt politician.  The One was supposed to be different.  Now we are discovering he isn't.

Americans anxiously watching their 401ks melt away may not have noticed the Obama administration is off to a rocky start in foreign policy, too. We were told often during the campaign that Mr. Obama would repair relationships with foreign governments allegedly damaged by the "cowboy" diplomacy of George W. Bush.  But in his first weeks in office, President Obama gratuitously has offended allies, and has made clumsy overtures -- contemptuously rebuffed -- to adversaries. Most puzzling has been the back of the hand treatment the president has given to our closest ally.  The British were ecstatic when Mr. Obama was elected.  They aren't any longer.

Few did more to reassure Jews it was "safe" to vote for Barack Hussein Obama - which they did by 78% - than Martin Peretz, financier and editor in chief of the New Republic magazine since 1974. "Can Friends of Israel -- and Jews -- Trust Obama?" he asked in an article in January of last year. His answer was yes.  "Obama's points, which he has made many times, should reassure anyone who is concerned about what his presidency would mean for the security of Israel," Mr. Peretz wrote then. But Mr. Obama's appointment of Charles "Chas" Freeman to be director of the National Intelligence Council is causing Mr. Peretz second thoughts.  A lot of Jews are starting to have "buyer's remorse" regarding Mr. Obama.  It's about time.

Barack Hussein Obama probably wouldn't be president if he hadn't taken a strong stand against the war in Iraq, which gained him the support of the antiwar Left. But he also talked about another war, the war in Afghanistan.  That was the important war, he said.  He'd beef up the U.S. presence there.  Politically, it made a great deal of sense.  The moonbats, thrilled by his opposition to the war in Iraq, overlooked Mr. Obama's hawkish rhetoric about Afghanistan.  And no Republican could accuse him of being weak on national security.  He wasn't against fighting America's enemies; he just wanted to fight them in the right place. But a national security policy designed chiefly for its effects on domestic politics has its drawbacks.  President Obama says little about Iraq these days, since he's essentially following George W. Bush's strategy there. And Afghanistan -- where he has announced he will boost U.S. troop strength by 17,000 -- has become "his" war. That war isn't going well.

His most ardent supporters debate whether Mr. Obama is more like Abraham Lincoln or like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But so far, the president he most closely resembles is Jimmy Carter.  Call him Jimmy Obama. In 1976, Mr. Carter was a fresh new face with a thin political resume who blew past better known Democrats in the primaries running as an "outsider" and a "reformer." Jimmy Carter, like Barack Hussein Obama, took office during tough economic times.  Mr. Carter coined the term "misery index" (the rates of inflation and unemployment added together). Mr. Carter proceeded to make a bad situation worse.  The misery index stood at 13.57 in the summer of 1976 when he was clubbing President Ford with it.  Four years later, it had risen to 21.98.  Now Jimmy Obama seems poised to follow in his footsetps.

The connection between depression and war is greater than most people realize. Hard economic times tend to radicalize people, and to turn them towards violence.  Hitler never would have ruled Germany, nor Mussolini Italy, if it hadn't been for the Great Depression. Conservative Republicans are fond of saying that it wasn't Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal that ended the Great Depression: it was World War II. Conservative Republicans are fond of saying this because it is indisputably true.  But conservative Republicans rarely reflect on why it was that World War II ended the Great Depression.  One who has is economist Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush.

At the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, the Greek king Pyrrhus defeated a Roman legion, but at frightful cost to his own troops.  When sycophantic courtiers congratulated him on his "great victory," Pyrrhus responded: "one more such victory, and we shall be undone." President Obama plans to celebrate his Asculum -- passage of the (at least) $787 billion "stimulus" bill -- with a signing ceremony in Denver tomorrow (2/17).  Sycophantic courtiers in the news media hailed this as a great victory for the president, but it comes at the cost of the illusion that Mr. Obama represents a change from the corrupt old ways of Washington. As a candidate, Mr. Obama pledged a bipartisan approach to government.  As a president, he is fond of only the appearance of bipartisanship.  He treats Republicans like a young man who expects a girl to put out if he buys her a hamburger and a beer.

Barack Hussein Obama is making an unforced error which will define his presidency, and could shorten it.  It's puzzling why. It's very much in the president's interest for Congress to pass an economic stimulus package that will work, because if the economy sinks further, it eventually will reflect upon him.  And it is very much in the president's interest to have a package that wins support of a quarter to a third of the Republicans in Congress, both because the public loves bipartisanship, and - more importantly - to spread the blame if the stimulus doesn't work. But the president has embraced a porkalooza that does neither, and he's marketing it with harsh, partisan rhetoric that undermines the image he cultivated during the campaign.  Failure to pass the measure as is would be a "catastrophe," he says.  It's critics are unpatriotic, he implies.  The shrillness of his rhetoric suggests Mr. Obama fears he may lose.  But the great danger to him is that he may win.

When in the 2008 campaign Democrats spoke of a "culture of corruption" in Washington, few realized they were making a promise. The Obama administration is only a few weeks old, but already more senior officials in it have suffered from ethical taint than in any previous administration. You've heard of the ethics travails of Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Eric Holder, and Hilda Solis.  Now comes the most recent candidate in Obama's malleable ethics sweepstakes:  Ron Sims, chosen Monday (2/02) to be the deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  As King County (Seattle) executive, Mr. Sims was fined $124,000 for "blatant" violations of Washington state's state public records act for failure to release documents with regard to financing of the stadium where the Seattle Seahawks play.  Last month the state supreme court said the fine should be increased.

Much has been made of the challenges facing Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, who assumes office in what appears to be the early stages of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  More should be made of the great opportunities he possesses. We Americans are more than two trillion dollars poorer, and counting, as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, and our confidence has been badly shaken.  But power is relative.  So here is a key fact to keep in mind: The United States is more powerful today relative to our adversaries than at any time since Aug. 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.

George W. Bush, private citizen, left Washington for Dallas today with the quiet dignity that was typical of his personal behavior during the eight tumultuous years of his presidency.  Mr. Bush leaves office as the most unpopular president in the history of polling. But it will be a decade or more before we have the perspective necessary to place the Bush presidency in history. Conservatives, for the most part, have been disappointed by Mr. Bush.  During his presidency Republicans lost all fiscal discipline.  Many of his appointments were alarmingly mediocre.  Even when he was doing the right thing, he did a poor job of communicating why. Still, we will miss his basic goodness, and his steadfastness. But I suspect that in six months or so, it will be the liberals who miss Mr. Bush most.

I've been opposed to Barack Hussein Obama's plans for a $775 billion "stimulus" package for three main reasons: First, the stated purpose of the stimulus is to encourage consumer spending; that is to say, to do more of what got us into financial trouble in the first place.  We've been living large on money borrowed chiefly from the Chinese.  That gravy train has lurched to a halt.  We need to live within our means.  That means saving money and paying down debt -- the opposite of what the designers of the stimulus package want us to do.  Second, because about 60 percent of the stimulus package is a grab bag of spending on government construction projects, it cannot achieve the stated goal of boosting the economy in the short term, because it takes too long for the money to trickle in.  Economist Bruce Bartlett published in the New York Times in January of last year a chart which indicated that in all eight post World War II recessions prior to this one, the government stimulus didn't take effect until after the recession ended.  Third...

European foreign ministers were startled Jan. 6 when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told them Hamas must not be permitted to win the conflict in Gaza.  That's not what they expected to hear from an Arab leader. Israel's invasion of Gaza has prompted denunciations from the usual suspects.  But as fictional detective Sherlock Holmes noted in solving the mystery of the disappearance of the race horse Silver Blaze, what's most interesting are the dogs that aren't barking. Moonbats in Europe and America are agitated, but protests against Israel in Sunni Moslem countries have been muted.  In the West Bank, there's barely been a peep of protest. This is because Sunni Moslem leaders view the terror group Hamas as a proxy for Iran.  And though Sunni Moslem rulers don't like Jews any more today than they did before, they don't fear Israel.  But they do fear Shia Iran.

There are, I suspect, quite a few jobs in government for which having no experience is not a liability.  But few would list CIA director among them.  Which is why Barack Obama's pick of Leon Panetta is causing so much consternation. A former congressman, Mr. Panetta, 70, served as budget director and then as chief of staff in the Clinton administration.  But he's never spent a day in the intelligence community. If you think it dangerous, at a time when we are engaged in two wars, to have a novice at the CIA, then you're likely appalled by the Panetta nomination. But if you think of the CIA as a rogue, dysfunctional agency that needs to be reined in, you may think Mr. Obama's choice is inspired. Because I think the CIA requires wholesale reform, I think better of the Panetta nomination than do most others.  But I have two huge concerns.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, had Milorad Blagojevich, Illinois' notoriously corrupt governor, arrested Dec. 9 because he feared "Hot Rod" was about to sell the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. At the time of the arrest, the FBI released portions of wiretaps in which Mr. Blagojevich discussed, in profane terms, what he wanted in exchange for picking the successor Mr. Obama preferred: a Cabinet post, or a cushy job with the Service Employees International Union. Since he had to know the FBI had been investigating him, many wondered why Hot Rod would speak so brazenly and recklessly on a line on which he ought to have suspected the FBI was listening. "He's utterly mad, completely and totally off his rocker," wrote Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown Dec. 10. "I've long since come to the conclusion that Rod Blagojevich is the stupidest governor in all of our 50 states." said Michael Barone, editor of the Almanac of American Politics. But if Hot Rod is crazy, he's crazy like a fox, and if he's stupid, he's smarter than most of the other Democrats in Illinois.

Irit Sheetrit, 36, a mother of four, was killed Monday night in the Israeli town of Ashdod when a Grad-type rocket struck the bus stop where she had run for cover.  Four others were injured in the attack. Earlier in the day Hani al-Mahdi, 27, was killed, and a dozen others wounded when a Grad rocket struck the construction site in Ashkelon where they were working. The deaths of Ms. Sheetrit and Mr. al-Mahdi passed largely unnoticed outside of Israel, as had the deaths of dozens of others in preceding months.  Outside of Israel, the news media are concerned only that the Israeli response to the attacks might be "disproportionate." What's truly disproportionate is that some 6,000 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel from Gaza since 2001, most of them since Israel unilaterally withdrew from there in 2005.

Act in haste, repent at leisure.

Back in October, when Congress was stampeded into approving a commitment of up to $700 billion to bail out banks who invested in mortgage-backed securities, we were told the money would be used to make a market for these now toxic financial instruments.

After Congress approved the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed strategy.  Rather than use the first $350 billion to buy up subprime mortgages, the government invested it in the banks themselves.

The Associated Press contacted 21 of the 116 banks that received federal money and asked them what they've done with it.  None were willing to say. Their reticence was understandable.

Our government now owes more money than all of us in the country put together possess. As of Sep. 30, federal financial statements showed approximately $56.4 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation reported.  The Federal Reserve estimated total household net worth at that time at $56.5 trillion.   Since then the stock market has crashed, tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth have evaporated, and the government has committed $700 billion to bail out financial institutions. A government which long has been morally and intellectually bankrupt is now financially bankrupt too. I used to infuriate my English teacher in high school by declaring that all anyone needed to know about life could be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).  She was not a fan of the bard of the barrack-room.  But the more I see of the world, the more sure I am that this is so.  We need the wisdom of his poem below.  You can be sure that the poem to be read at Mr. Obama's inauguration will be its antithesis.

The collapse of oil prices is having a devastating impact on our enemies in Iran and Venezuela, and our sometimes enemies in Russia. The Iranian economy was a mess even when oil prices were high.  The mullahs maintain a tenuous hold on power through massive subsidies for food and energy, subsidies they can no longer afford to pay now that oil revenues are a third of what they were in the summer. Hugo Chavez's situation is even more dire.  Germany's Deutsche Bank estimated in October Venezuela needed an oil price of $95 a barrel to keep its budget in balance.  Venezuela had food shortages and raging inflation before oil prices collapsed.  If Mr. Chavez has to cut subsidies -- as he must -- he could be toppled in a matter of months. But except for Venezuela -- where nothing but good can come from Mr. Chavez' misery -- we should temper our schadenfreude (pleasure in the misfortune of others) with caution.  Because desperate circumstances cause desperate men to do desperate things.

What does Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have to trade for a lighter sentence? Pondering this question is, I suspect, keeping many prominent people in Chicago awake nights. Mr. Blagojevich is accused of conspiring to sell government favors for personal benefit. But his great crime, in the eyes of many politicians, is that he has made "pay to play" all too easy for ordinary people to understand and too ugly for them to ignore. "Hot Rod" Blago tried to sell Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. He held up an appropriation for a children's hospital to extort a $50,000 contribution from a hospital executive. He tried to have journalists at the Chicago Tribune fired for writing editorials critical of him. The FBI has Mr. Blagojevich on tape, incriminating himself in vulgar, profane language. Hot Rod's brazen overreach is shocking, which is one reason why this scandal is likely to have longer legs than any since Monica Lewinsky's trysts with President Bill Clinton. The other big reason why this scandal has legs is, of course, the relationship between Hot Rod and the president-elect.

The Detroit Lions were thrashed, as usual, in their annual Thanksgiving Day football game, bringing their record for the season to 0-11.  This prompted some sports fans to wonder why the Lions' owners tolerate such consistent failure.  But then, the Lions are owned by the Ford family. This column is about the automobile industry.  But I want to begin it with three numbers, because they define the environment in which the fate of the Big Three must be discussed. The first is $13.84 trillion.  That's the estimated value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year. The second is $7.6 trillion.  That, according to the Bloomberg News Service, is the current amount for which taxpayers could be on the hook for the bailouts to date of financial institutions.  It's more than half the value of the gross domestic product. The third is $4.6 trillion.  That, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research, is the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II.

"It isn't what you don't know that hurts you," said cowboy philosopher Will Rogers.  "It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mr. Obama will assume office in the early stages of a recession.  He is not responsible for the circumstances that have caused it.  But because of something he knows for sure that "just ain't so," he could make the recession much more severe than it otherwise would be. He told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle in January his energy plan likely would bankrupt the coal industry and send electricity rates skyrocketing. Reporters Carla Marinucci and Joe Garafoli considered these remarks so unremarkable they didn't mention them in the story they wrote on Mr. Obama's meeting with the editorial board.  (Here's the video of Mr. Obama's remarks.) But the 350,000 people who work in the coal industry, and the 57 percent of us who get our electricity chiefly from coal-fired plants might have a different view.

Mr. Obama is considering appointing Sen. Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State.  Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, thinks this would be a good idea. Marty Peretz, editor in chief of the influential liberal magazine The New Republic, thinks it would be a bad idea. My attitude is, since Mr. Obama is most unlikely to pick the candidate I prefer -- former UN Ambassador John Bolton -- why not Hillary?  Especially in comparison to the announced alternatives.

Ordinarily, the identity of the party chairman doesn't matter very much.  The proof of this is that the current chairman of the Republican National Committee is Mike Duncan.  I hadn't heard of him, either. The party chairman is usually mostly a fund-raiser and a technician.  But this is one of those rare times in history when the chairman of the Republican National Committee will have to function as the chief spokesman for the party, its primary public face. The RNC will select a new chairman soon. The new leader needs to be a man of ideas and vision who can communicate them well, and a superb fund-raiser who is comfortable with the new technologies.  But Ronald Reagan is unavailable, and Superman and Batman exist only in comic books. But there is a man whose time has come, or, rather, returned.

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this has never been done before. Within days of Sarah Palin's selection by John McCain to be his running mate, there was speculation in the news media that maternal neglect was the cause of baby Trig's Down Syndrome; that Trig was really daughter Bristol's baby; that Sarah was a fundamentalist who believes dinosaurs and men coexisted; that she once belonged to a secessionist party; that as mayor of Wasilla, she tried to have popular books banned from the town library. None of this was true, but this was how the news media introduced Gov. Palin to people in the lower 48.  No vice presidential candidate has ever been subjected to such a torrent of abuse.

"After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is," wrote Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times Tuesday about Barack Hussein Obama, with whom he's spent roughly 18 hours a day for most of this campaign. Sen. Obama rarely engages in banter with the reporters who travel with him, and typically is in "robo-candidate mode" on the rare occasions he does speak with them, Mr. Nicholas said. "Ironically, those of us who were sent out to take his measure in person can't offer much help in answering who he is, or if he is ready.  The barriers set in place between us and him were just too great." Less is known about Barack Hussein Obama than about any major party candidate for president in modern history.  His public resume is thin -- eight years in the Illinois state senate, four in the U.S. Senate, with two of them being spent running for president. And no candidate for president has had more problematic associations.  Here's a quick list of them that the media refuses to investigate.

When the U.S. economy catches cold, the rest of the world gets pneumonia. That's because much of the wealth of the rest of the world depends on selling stuff to us, and/or on investing in our economy. The cold we've caught from the subprime mortgage crisis is pretty serious. As of Oct. 22, our stock market was down 40 percent for the year. But, as the erudite cynic who writes for the Asia Times under the pen name "Spengler" notes, it's a lot worse almost everywhere else. The financial crisis will push already troubled -- and nuclear armed -- Pakistan further towards radical Islam.  Turkey, heretofore the most peaceful, democratic and pro-Western of Islamic countries, also will drift towards the dark side. By far the most dangerous wild card is...

Among the first fruits of an Obama presidency will be an international crisis, his running mate said in Seattle last weekend. "Mark my words.  It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy," Sen. Joe Biden said at a fund-raiser. "Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy." Sen. Obama's response to the crisis may not seem adequate, Sen. Biden said.

The news media can do investigative reporting when the spirit so moves.  Consider the proctological exam journalists gave Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber," within a day of Sen. John McCain having referred to him in the final presidential debate. We now know that Joe, 34, does not have a plumber's license and does not belong to the plumbers' union. He's divorced, earned just $40,000 in 2006, and had a tax lien against him. Joe says he doesn't need a license to do residential work in the two-person firm (A.W. Newell Corp.) for whom he works, because Al Newell has a license.  That's kopasetic within the city of Toledo, but Joe would need a license of his own to do work elsewhere in Lucas County, county officals say.  Only about a third of all plumbers in the U.S. belong to the plumbers' union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Absolutely none of this information is relevant to the question Joe asked when Barack Obama approached him on a rope line in the Toledo suburb of Holland Oct. 12, or to the impolitic answer Sen. Obama gave to it.

In last week's column, I wrote that Sen. Obama had written a dust jacket blurb for ex-Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers' memoir, "Fugitive Days."  This is not true.  Sen. Obama's praise was for an earlier book by Mr. Ayers, "A Kind and Just Parent," published in 1997. I'm putting this correction at the beginning of this column rather than at the end as is customary because I am mortified by my mistake, and I don't want it to become a part of Internet lore.

There is enough misinformation out there already. On Oct. 11, veteran civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis compared John McCain and Sarah Palin to segregationist George Wallace.

"My friends, we've got them just where we want them," Sen. John McCain said in a revamped stump speech Monday (10/13). Since Sen. Barack Hussein Obama has leads ranging from 4 to 11 percentage points in the major polls, few conservative pundits share Sen. McCain's optimism. Given the severity of the financial crisis, it's doubtful a Republican ticket headed by Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan could prevail this November.   The amazing thing is  Sen. McCain still has a chance to win. That chance will evaporate if economic turmoil continues.  But if the stock and credit markets stabilize and panic subsides, Sen. McCain still could prevail -- but only if he elevates his game in the final debate tomorrow (10/15).

Who is Barack Hussein Obama?  Is he the thoughtful, moderate guy he's appeared to be in the first two presidential debates?  Or is he a closet radical? The election is less than a month away, and we still don't know. In his campaign advertising, Sen. McCain has made much of the association between Sen. Obama and William Ayers, a leader of the Weatherman domestic terror group in the 1970s who has never expressed regret for setting bombs in the Capitol, the Pentagon and police stations.  But Sen. McCain didn't mention Mr. Ayers in Tuesday's debate. "Why doesn't he say these things to my face?" Sen. Obama wondered in an interview with ABC after that debate.  It's a fair question.  And a puzzling one, because the relationship between Sen. Obama and Mr. Ayers is much closer than Sen. Obama has so far acknowledged. 

"All you have to do is go down Union street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie's Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years," said Sen. Joe Biden in the vice presidential debate to bolster his assertion he's in touch with the concerns of the middle class. That answer suggested otherwise. "It came as a surprise to us in Delaware that Joe Biden recently had a meal and talked with patrons at Katie's Restaurant on Union Street in Wilmington," said an email to National Review Online.  "Katie's Restaurant closed years ago.  It was on Scott Street in Little Italy." The people who fill up at his neighborhood gas station can't pay for a full tank of gas, Sen. Biden said.  Sen. Biden lives in a 7,000 square foot estate on a four acre lakefront lot in Greenville, which is described as "northern Delaware's priciest area." Sen. Biden says things which are not true with passionate conviction.  That's a polite description of a pathological liar.

Who is Will, Good? Mr. Good Will -- who lists his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You" -- has contributed 1,000 times to the Obama campaign. All the contributions have been in amounts of $25 or less.  But they add up to $17,375 -- far more than the legal limit of $4,600 ($2,300 each for the primary and general election campaigns). Kenneth Timmerman, a reporter for NewsMax, discovered Mr. Good Will when he reviewed 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest Federal Elections Commission master file for the Obama campaign. Mr. Good Will said he was from Austin, Texas.  When I called Directory Assistance, they could find no listing for him.   Who is Pro, Doodad?