From Legal Insurrection:

As I suspected, provocateur Lauren Valle was not so innocent.

In an amazing videotape obtained by Redstate, Valle is shown rushing Rand Paul’s car and shoving something into the window before it had come to a stop and again charging him as he exited the vehicle — clearly provocative and threatening actions which should have alerted bystanders that she posed a danger.

This completely debunks the left-blogosphere’s narrative that Valle was an innocent bystander who just happened to speak out against Paul when she was attacked by “Brownshirts.”…

If you click on the link to watch the video, it is clear the woman is acting in a very odd manner…a manner which, if it were the President, the Secret Service would have taken her down (and they don’t take people down gently). If you’re going to do that, don’t go whining about getting hurt…whether it was a deliberate provocation or just a lefty woman acting like a screwball is unknown and likely unknowable, but it is clearly not a case of TEA Party activists just stomping on someone they don’t agree with.

The Chicago Way – from ABC:

The Democratic National Committee formally has asked the Pentagon for reams of correspondence between military agencies and nine potential Republican presidential candidates, a clear indication that Democrats are building opposition-research files on specific 2012 contenders even before the midterm elections…

They are shameless, aren’t they? Just trolling for whatever they can find because they know come 2012 they simply won’t be able to run on their record.

We’ve got them on the run, good people…

As relevant now as then

So much is happening so fast and we just can’t be at the blog 24/7 to cover it, I’ve decided that it will be worthwhile each day from now until Tuesday to have an open thread. Please keep the topics to the election – polls, candidates, issues, that sort of thing. Lets have a free-flowing discussion of the races, the issues and what we think may happen.

All sorts of good effects from Obama’s policies – from Bloomberg:

The lowest-rated junk bonds are the most expensive corporate debt following a Federal Reserve- induced rally in high-risk assets, adding to concern fixed- income securities are overvalued…

Yeah, no freakin’ kidding. Look, this is what happens when you bail out banks, print a couple trillion dollars and just shovel money through the financial sector: all sorts of BS investments become attractive. If you really want to grasp what is happening here – our Federal Reserve is picking our pockets and handing our money to others…and they are buying junk bond with it!

Mish best describes what is happening:

In fact, the Fed’s policies are helping neither the real nor unreal economies unless you consider creating another opportunity for Goldman Sachs and select hedge funds to short at the opportune time, appropriate “help”.

Boil it down: the banksters and bureaucrats are having a ball, and getting ready to stick us with the bill as they will know when to short everything and get out with their wealth intact.

There never was an easy way out of this – but the longer Obama runs the government, Democrats run the Congress and Bernanke runs the Fed, the worse this will get. Voting Republican in 2010 is not a cure-all, but it is the very best first step we can take to right our financial ship.

From SFGate:

In the not to be missed category, Sen. Dianne Feinstein stepped way out of the spin cycle yesterday, as she is often wont to do.

Feinstein was at a campaign event for Sen. Barbara Boxer in San Jose,and was asked by KTVU’s Randy Shandobil how things were going, and she replied, “bad.”

Feinstein is Boxer’s campaign co-chair.

Shandobil asked whether Feinstein meant in the House, which Democrats are widely expected to lose, and Feinstein didn’t answer. Later, after the event, she (un)clarified this much: “I think the prevailing view is, and I don’t think this is necessarily correct, is that it’s a very difficult time, there’s no question about that.”…

Just a bit of truth, sneaking out.

I’ve also noted that some Democrats are trying to pre-spin their loss even as others keep up with an increasingly absurd “we’re doing great!” line. Just how bad it will be remains to be seen – it also remains to be seen how many races will fall inside the “margin of fraud” and thus allow a Democrat here and there squeak through to “victory” (its not a question of if they’ll cheat but, instead, how much they will…of course, the bigger the thumping we give them, the less it matters).

I’ve been observing politics for just a bit more than 30 years and I’ve never seen a situation like this. The level of voter anger eclipses 1980 and 1994; in fact, it may be that we’re in entirely uncharted waters and no one really has a handle on just what will happen on Tuesday – other than it being a rejection of the current Democrat leadership (that is pretty much settled). All anyone can really do at this point is work for his side, and then vote. The ultimate result cannot be altered, at this point, by any one action.

From the Mail and Guardian:

…Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30m tonnes lower than last year, a 5,5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

“The situation has deteriorated since September,” said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. “In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008…

Part of this is just related to climate – not the bogus “global climate change” of the left, but the simple fact that they had really bad weather in Russia this past year, and weather predictions for the new year look pretty grim, as well (and, sorry environmentalists, the predictions are for a lot of very cold weather). We can’t really do too much about the weather, but we can do something about this: the United States has 21.5% less agricultural land now than we had in 1950.

With a population double what we had back then, we’ve got vastly less agricultural land to farm on. We have steadily decreased our agricultural base for decades now – and here we are, about to have a global food crisis which could probably have been easily filled if America farmed the way it used to.

Outside of the actual pain this food crisis could cause – especially among the poorest and most vulnerable – there is also the practical effect on American wealth. By not producing as much food as we used to, we have that much less to sell on the global market – part of our trade deficit is caused by the fact that we are not the gigantic food exporter we used to be (in fact, we may end up being a net food importer soon, if not already). While people like to concentrate on high tech jobs, it must not be forgotten that America’s first impact on the world was our gigantic agricultural industry – we used to feed the world, now we can barely feed ourselves.

This is why I yammer on endlessly on the subject of production – the “make/mine/grow” thing. We have to get back to doing the hard work we used to do – it is the only way to wealth; it is the only way to restored American prosperity. We either get back to work, or we eventually die as a nation. It is really just that simple.

Done in 2 minutes and 2 seconds:

From Harris Interactive:

…Currently, two-thirds of Americans (67%) have a negative opinion of the job President Obama is doing while just over one-third (37%) have a positive opinion. This continues the president’s downward trend and he is now at the lowest job approval rating of his presidency.

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 3,084 adults surveyed online between October 11 and 18, 2010 by Harris Interactive…

…While the president is at a low point, there is a political body with ratings much lower than his. Just one in ten Americans (11%) give Congress positive ratings on the job they are doing while nine in ten (89%) give them negative marks. While Congress may be under Democratic control, even four in five Democrats (81%) give them negative ratings…

Not at all where Obama and his Democrats want to be a week before the vote. Generally, these sorts of polling results bode very, very ill for the party in power. They are the sort of results where, once the votes are counted, phrases like “historic” and “unprecedented” are applied to the shellacking the ruling part takes…

From CNN:

California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is in the hospital for an infection related to reconstructive surgery after her battle with breast cancer, Fiorina’s campaign announced…

Just part of her long battle with breast cancer, and if anyone can take it and bounce back, she’s the one.