Our guest columnist this morning is celebrated political columnist Dave Weigel.

So it’s possible that, on the west coast, the greatest GOP wave since the 1940s will have only produced one Republican gain in Washington state. If you cheat and count Hawaii as part of the “west,” the net Democratic loss is, so far, zero, because the party gained back the House seat in Honolulu. Not enough to worry Republicans about their huge gains in the Midwest, but a weird mystery irregardless.

Dave Weigel is from Delaware.

The Democrats’ Western Firewall [Slate]

Image: Roadside America

“Just about a year to the day that he left CNN, Lou Dobbs is returning to cable news, this time as host of his own show on News Corp.’s Fox Business Network… Dobbs will instantly become one of the biggest names on Fox Business.” [LAT]

“Two tugboats slowly pulled a disabled cruise ship with nearly 4,500 passengers and crew toward San Diego on Wednesday… Passengers have been subsisting on Spam, Pop Tarts and canned crabmeat flown in by Navy helicopters.” [AP/Yahoo]

1. “Index the retirement age to longevity — i.e., increase the retirement age to qualify for Social Security — to age 69 by 2075.”

2. “Increase the Social Security contribution ceiling: while people only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,800 of their wages today, that’s only about 86% of the total potentially taxable wages. The co-chairs suggest raising the ceiling to capture 90% of wages.”

The Grand Compromise: For every point we increase taxable income, we increase the retirement age by a year. We’ll be happy to tax 100 percent of income, as long as you’re happy to wait until 79 to retire.

Fiscal Commission Co-Chairs Simpson And Bowles Release Eye-Popping Recommendations [TPM]

WPVI-TV, Philly:

School officials hope her appearance in the end will bring in several hundred dollars. Palin’s appearance fee, thought to be $75,000, was reportedly covered by private donors.

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Palin, who was paid for her appearance, spent the day with students and participated in a $750-a-person fund-raising dinner for the school earlier in the evening at the Cock ‘N Bull restaurant in Lahaska. Tickets for her presentation cost $75 to $250.

Neither reports the actual amount raised for Plumstead Christian, “a K-12 school founded as a Mennonite school in 1948.” But we’re left wondering whether it would have been more efficient to just hand over that 75 large direct to the school, and cut out the middlema’am.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqZf0Etnjc

We interrupt this Premise to bring you a commercial that also appeared on the show last night, for a product we’ve never seen advertised. Or a product category we’ve never seen advertised.

Of course, over time we’ll get used to pitches for replacement body parts, just as we’re used to pitches for prescription boner pills with a significant risk of chronic turgidity, or pitches for prescription happy pills with only a minor risk of suicide.

And then we’ll be shocked — shocked! — at the first pitch we see for discount brain transplants.

And now, back to our hilarious letters to Keith from five-year-olds Billy, Sean, and Gle— oh, we’re sorry, our producer is telling us we’re out of time. But before we go, our humble appreciation for the 350,000 people who completely ignored us the past five days. You may now update your Twitter avatars to the next moral fad.

We’ve always loved this Mad cover. We probably still have the issue in a drawer at the Ancestral Home.

And if Time Warner, parent company of E.C. Publications, would like us to yank it from our website, we have a brand-spankin’-new DMCA Notice page for their lawyers to badger us.

Oh, and our $105 DMCA registration fee is in the mail to the U.S. Copyright Office. We’d like to thank our Usual Gang of Above-the-Timestamp Idiots for chipping in on the expense.

Why all the bother? Simple: If we don’t do it, Bad People will bankrupt us.

The $105 Fix That Could Protect You From Copyright-Troll Lawsuits [Wired, Oct. 27]

EFF Defends Former Prosecutor From Righthaven Copyright Suit [Wired, Nov. 1]