Yes, I’m working, but I also keep finding excellent stuff that I just have to share with you

To begin with, DL Sly is right that, if I don’t make each and every one of you aware of Iowahawk’s latest post of genius, I am doing you a profound disservice.  I won’t even make an effort to summarize what Iowahawk has done.  Suffice to say that your life will forever have a slightly diminished quality if you don’t read it.

Okay, having improved your lives, let’s get back to business:

Mike Devx has noted that, having smeared the polls when they were pro-Obama, we look foolish and hypocritical if we suddenly embrace them now that they show Romney inching up.  He’s right.  The pollsters have lost control of the statistics.  They don’t know what the heck they’re doing, and they’re doing it with only 9% of the public helping them out.  Jon Podhoretz says that Monday, October 8, was the worst day of all, and can be called “the day polling died.”  What’s more interesting to me is what I see on Facebook and hear at the school bus stop.  Obama supporters are starting to get that startled look of someone emerging from a pleasant dream, only to discover that the real world didn’t go away.

Romney is assuming rightly that Obama will come to the next debate loaded for bear (so will Biden, leaving Ryan with the distasteful task of picking his way through Biden’s inevitable lies).  Those of us who know Obama, though, don’t believe that his renewed energy will lead to a better debate showing.  He’ll still have attached to him the problems that dogged him in the first debate.  He won’t become more articulate, he won’t have greater knowledge, and, worst of all, he’ll still be struggling to hide his core truth, which is that he doesn’t like America, doesn’t like Israel, and doesn’t believe in individualism.  If you’re trying to debate extemporaneously in a way that is counter to your underlying belief systems, you will fail.  Oh, Obama has one more problem:  hubris.  Toby Harnden has a great post summarizing Obama’s disdain for Romney and the democratic process, as well as his laziness.

And finally, on a completely different subject, Jay Greene says that there is no teacher shortage.  His starting point is the fact that classroom sizes are significantly smaller than they were when I was a student back in 1970, but outcomes are unchanged.  From there, he talks about the downsides of hiring ever more teachers in order to reach some magic point at which the teacher student ratio is perfect.  I couldn’t agree more with Greene’s conclusions.  What do you think?