Jake Jacobsen of Freedom Folks and Blogs4Borders has an interview with Peter Brimelow on YouTube:

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Jim Russell is the author of Breach of Faith: American Churches and the Immigration Crisis. (Joe Guzzardi discussed it here.) He’s also running for Congress, which doesn’t have enough authors in it. He’s running against Nita Lowey in Westchester County, where immigration is pretty bad.

Immigration foe makes run at Lowey

By Gerald McKinstry
The Journal News, October 5, 2008

She’s a 10-term incumbent with a $1.1 million war chest.

He’s a semiretired computer consultant with $19,000 in campaign debt from previous races and a candidate for a congressional district that spans parts of Westchester and Rockland counties in which there are 72,000 more Democrats than Republicans.

So does Jim Russell, a conservative Republican running against Rep. Nita Lowey, D-Harrison, actually think he can win?

“I think she might be surprised what people are saying,” Russell said last week in an interview with The Journal News. “It’s a very unpredictable election season. If that picks up, there could be massive dissatisfaction.

“Twenty years of Nita Lowey is enough,” he said. “I just don’t think she’s done a good job.”[More]

Nita Lowey has an F- rating on immigration from NumbersUSA. On border control, about the best you can say is that she’s not actually in favor of tunnels under the border, since she voted yes on a bill to prevent tunnels. However, she also voted no on a lot of fence bills.

In New York Magazine, John Heilemann has a piece on the MSM turning on McCain:

I have sat across from Chris Matthews enough times now, participating in that psychotropic ritual known as Hardball, that I thought I’d heard it all—but then the other night he uncorked a doozy that actually rendered me speechless. (No, that is not a misprint.) “Let’s start with John McCain,” he said to me on the air shortly after the first presidential debate between McCain and Barack Obama. “Do you think he was too troll-like tonight? You know, too much of a troll?” I laughed. “Seriously,” Chris went on. “Do people really want to put up with four years of that? Of [him] sitting there, angrily, grumpily, like a codger?”

As both a media figure and a human being, Matthews is sui generis—and yet what made his comments so remarkable was how unremarkable they were. In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.[How John McCain Went From Maverick to Crank, October 5, 2008]

Of course, he was always like that, but they didn’t feel like pointing it out as long as he was a “maverick”–a loose cannon aimed at the Republican Party.

But as Mickey Kaus points out, none of those people were ever actually McCain supporters–they’re Democrats. Once McCain became the Republican nominee, opposed to Obama, the “promised prince” then McCain’s days as a media idol were over.

My wife is reading this new psychobiography about Bill Clinton by John Gartner, which she quite likes. Gartner specializes in “hypomania,” that fortunate cousin of manic-depression. Hypomanics can maintain a controlled level of high-energy living for years on end. Teddy Roosevelt is probably the most famous American hypomanic.

One interesting thing about it is its realism about why Bill Clinton played an important role in recent American political history, which Gartner sees as having roughly the same causes as Shaquille O’Neal’s large role in recent NBA history. Usually, biographers try to come up with some nonsense about how the leader embodied the Spirit of the Age or whatever, but part of Gartner’s approach is more down to earth: Clinton was born with the tools to be a highly successful conventional politician.

Nobody is too sure who Bill Clinton’s genetic father was, but Gartner makes a strong case that it was a hard-working local doctor whose legitimate children have grown up to be successful professionals as well. Bill’s mom was of course a tramp, but a bright, charming tramp.

Clinton is a largely self-taught politician. He didn’t have, say, George H.W. Bush around to imitate. But he taught himself lots of useful tricks. For example, when working the rope line, most politicians don’t look into the eyes of the person they are currently shaking hands with because they are already looking for the hand of the next person to shake hands with. Clinton, however, makes solid eye contact with each person he shakes hands; meanwhile, he’s using his left hand to feel blindly for the next hand he’s going to shake. (Perhaps being left-handed helped him invent that trick.)

In one section, Gartner takes a psychometric approach to Clinton. Unfortunately, he lacks actual psychometric data on Clinton, such as an IQ score, but his rough estimates are of interest:

Hitting the genetic jackpot

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