PAUL GREENBERG: A Fair Tax That Really Is One. I'd go along with Greenberg if a consumption tax replaced the current income tax.

SCORING TONIGHT'S CBS/NATIONAL JOURNAL DEBATE: No clear winner; questions remain.

POLITICAL CALCULATIONS: Whose Income Should You Tax? Not very good news for the political elite, I should think.

OCCUPY FAIL:

Man shot to death near Occupy Oakland camp.

Shooting closes half of Occupy Burlington site.

Tuberculosis breaks out at Occupy Atlanta.

Occupy Portland camps to be cleared on Sunday.

Not looking good for the 'Occupiers'.

DO NOTHING: the Obama uncertainty machine.

THE MAIN DIFFERENCE between the Tea Party movement and 'Occupy' protesters [is that] "we, like America’s Founders, declare our independence from government. The Occupy Wall Street protesters declare their dependence on government."

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY: the potential is there, but extraction could cause earthquakes. If the quakes could be confined to some specific area -- say the San Francisco bay area -- I'd be all for it.

FAST AND FURIOUS was not botched; it was carried out exactly as planned.

RON PAUL: When I am President ....

LACK OF R&D prompting fears over U.S. ability to compete globally? And the solution is?

"Attracting the talents of the best and brightest from other countries can help prospects for American workers, because in an innovation economy, jobs often beget jobs."

Sadly, I don't think so. Here's where the 'best and brightest' are going. The solution is to grow your own, and our colleges and universities are doing an abysmal job.

WELL, WELL: 70% of those subject to the millionaire surtax are small business owners.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Ignorance Exploited.

THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW: Engineering the 10,000 year clock. Of course the clock will be vandalized well short of its expected lifespan.

OBVIOUSLY: Is the Keystone pipeline decision a political ploy?

HEH. With friends like these, it's no wonder small business owners fight back.

HOW UNPRESIDENTIAL! Most of the video clips you can safely ignore, but the jabs at Fox's Shephard Smith are priceless.

NEVER BEFORE has a generation arisen with the promised [sic] of highly developed talent and education, prepared to lead us into the new, service-based economy of the Information Age.

Perhaps that's because the idea of a 'service-based' economy is -- and always has been -- a pipe dream.

HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE from today's Washington Post: Mariann Budde, Diocese of Washington’s next top bishop, has plans for reviving the Episcopal Church. The article is about her efforts to revive a declining church, and here is the paragraph I found most interesting:

[F]or nearly two centuries it was the faith of America’s elite. Despite never having huge numbers, the American wing of Anglicanism dominated institutions from the Supreme Court to Congress to the local pool club; its churches were built in the grandest, most prominent spot in many a town square.

I rather suspect that the fall of the Church is less a matter of religion than it is a matter of the elites who 'occupy' it.

IT TOOK OVER 50 YEARS, but we're finally getting there.

KIM STRASSEL on Tuesday's election in Virginia. We won. Big.

OBAMA'S ECONOMIC PLAN.

OF COURSE there's no smuggling across the Arizona border. From the email that accompanied the link to this video:

The most infuriating aspect of this fiasco is that Janet Napolitano, a former Arizona Governor who should know better than anyone the chaotic conditions that exist on the border, stands there with a straight face and tells us the border has never been more secure.

Here is some fresh video we retrieved from one of our cameras in a wash northwest of Three Points, near the eastern edge of the Tohono O’odham Reservation. There were a total of 82 activations of the camera between October 1 and November 1, but we’ve compiled only seven 20-second clips for this posting on YouTube. Two clips show drug smugglers and the rest are illegal aliens – all using the same trail.

FUKUSHIMA: a blow-by-blow account of the first 24 hours.