While the Shadow Party has supported Tea Party–favored candidates such as Kentucky senatorial hopeful Rand Paul and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s challenger Sharron Angle, Rove’s support of incumbent Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican senate positioned him as a threat, and possibly a corrective, to the Tea Party’s influence. This animosity may have reached its apex with the win of Castle-stormer Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party–backed national oddity who, in a recent interview, accused Rove of “political cannibalism”—that is, eating of one’s own kind—and also predicted that “he’s eating some humble pie and he’s just trying to restore his reputation”—the humble pie presumably having Republican filling.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/09/karl-rove-to-the-rescue-can-he-wrest-the-gop-from-the-tea-party.html

The Royal Spanish Academy has invited people around the world to record short chunks of the classic novel Don Quixote and upload them to YouTube.

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is often described as Spain's most famous novel - and yet few have ever read it.

Now the academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has divided the work into more than 2,000 segments.

They will be read and recorded - in Spanish only - by volunteers visiting a special YouTube page.

The academy said the campaign was aimed at promoting both the Spanish language and the famous book, which carried the full title The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-1144951

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All I need to do is animate the toon at top...

  ... Whitman is representative of an emerging Republican type — what you might call the austerity caucus. Flamboyant performers like Sarah Palin get all the attention, but the governing soul of the party is to be found in statehouses where a loose confederation of über-wonks have become militant budget balancers. Just as welfare reformers of the 1990s presaged compassionate conservatism, so the austerity brigades presage the national party’s next chapter.

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012, is the spiritual leader. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is the rising star. Jeb Bush is the eminence. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rob Portman, a Senate candidate in Ohio, also fit the mold.

These are people who can happily spend hours in the budget weeds looking for efficiencies. They’re being assisted by budget experts from the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute and freelancers like Bob Grady, who did budgeting in George H.W. Bush’s administration. Members of the caucus have a similar sense of the role history has assigned them. “This state had a party for 10 years and I’m the guy who got called in to clean up the mess,” Christie says.

Christie is the Hot New Thing in the group because he not only has ideas to cut deficits but he’s found a political strategy to enact them, even with a Democratic Legislature. One of the keys to cutting budgets, he says, is that “almost nothing can be sacrosanct.” Inheriting an $11 billion deficit, he spread cuts across every agency. He even had to cut education spending by $820 million but said any individual district could avoid cuts if the teachers there would be willing to chip in 1.5 percent of their salaries to help pay for health benefits (few districts took advantage of this).

Democrats fought the cuts but could not swing public opinion. The big showdown came over the “millionaires’ tax.” Democrats sought to raise revenue by taxing the affluent. Christie vetoed the tax, arguing that the state, already hemorrhaging jobs, couldn’t afford to make the business climate any worse. He won that battle and has dominated the state since. He was elected with 49 percent of the vote in a three-way race, and now he has a 57 percent approval rating.

Whitman has brought Christie to California to campaign for her and says he offers a roadmap of where she’d like to go. It’s not clear that Whitman has as deft an enactment strategy as Christie does. It’s also not clear that Californians are as alarmed about their fiscal mess as people in New Jersey.

But Whitman has the personality type that you’re seeing more and more of these days. Not big picture, like Reagan. Not an idea volcano, like Gingrich. Not a straightforward man of faith, like George W. Bush. The quintessential New Republican is detail-oriented, managerial, tough-minded, effective but a little dry. If Whitman wins her race, she’ll fit right in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/opinion/01brooks.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print