Saturday 10/16 links

Power Line blogger "Hindrocket," aka John H. Hinderaker, has been busy. He notes that Sen. Kerry is resorting to desperate tactics, and speculates that the campaign's polls are much more grim than those published. He also reports that Tom Daschle may be ineligible for South Dakota office (such as the Senate seat he is trying to keep) because he and his wife declared their Washington, DC mansion to be their "principal residence."

It is becoming increasingly clear that Sen. Kerry sustained immense damage for his "lesbian" remark at Wednesday's debate. Captain's Quarters blogger "Captain Ed" Morrissey: "Expect this to dominate the weekend political news, kneecapping what the Kerry/Edwards campaign hoped to use as a launch towards Election Day."

Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol: "How stupid does John Kerry think the American people are? Does he really think they will believe that he singled out Mary Cheney because he 'was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue?' Does he think they will accept his claim that he was saying something about the Cheneys' 'love of their daughter'?"

UK columnist/blogger Stephen Pollard reprints an email ostensibly sent by a retired US diplomat, who asserts, among other things: "Kerry hasn't grasped this fundamental change. He hasn't comprehended that the UN, as well as other multilateral institutions, has stopped being a preserve of internationally agreed rules and collective action backed by broad consensus. These institutions have become, instead, vehicles for the pursuit of narrow self-interests by any number of major regional powers which aspire to great power status. (France, Russia, Germany, India, Brazil, China). This is a drastically different international order from the one Kerry presumes to know."

New York Times columnist David Brooks provides us with an extract from the transcript of the fourth debate. He puts one truly classic line into the mouth of Sen. Kerry: "Bob [Schieffer], when I'm president, we're going to have a president as gloomy as this country should be."

Satirical blogger ScrappleFace Scott Ott breaks the news: "Bush Orders Military Draft to Win More Votes"

Belmont Club blogger "Wretchard" suggests that "time spent living in the Third World is an education without which one's understanding of Terror is sadly incomplete."

Weekly Standard columnist Arnold Beichman is in his nineties now, so old that he recalls when the "Old Left" was just the left. He recommends Stephen Koch's Double Lives, about Stalin's useful intellectual idiots, first published about 10 years ago and evidently just released in paperback. I've read it, and it is superb.

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell takes issue with safety zealots, who seldom consider the costs their theories impose.

Nina & Tim Zagat (and ghostwriter Tim Gathje) contribute a column to The New York Times. It's about restaurants.