There's been a lot of NPR-bashing on the right these days after the government-supported radio network fired Juan Williams while its top executive publicly cast aspersions on his mental health in a wildly inappropriate fashion. Even my friend and longtime colleague Seth Lipsky piled on over the weekend.

But it's worth remembering that NPR has had its share of defenders and fans on the right.

Mutual fund giant Vanguard is apologizing and distancing itself from its pre-election blog post crediting the Obama stimulus bill passed without the votes of any House Republicans with averting a second Great Depression.

A post here earlier this week faulted the policy views of the blog post and wondered why the company was posting what it described as a "guess" by an official about a politics and public policy question so close to an election. The FutureOfCapitalism blog post went viral on Facebook and was picked up by the highly trafficked blogs Instapundit and Ace of Spades. It also generated an outpouring of dismay in the comments below the original FutureOfCapitalism post, including several from Vanguard investors who wrote that they intended to withdraw their investments from the firm in reaction.

The Sharron Angle Nevada Senate campaign's top lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, sent an email earlier today reporting "some teachers' union representatives were offering Starbucks cards to people to get them to vote for Harry Reid." Fox 5 in Las Vegas is also reporting that some voters are arriving at their electronic voting machines to find Senator Reid's name already checked:

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen."Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."

Give the Heritage Foundation credit for getting ahead of the curve. The election hasn't even happened yet, and Heritage is already calling for a term limit on Speaker Boehner. The conservative think tank doesn't say how many terms or years the limit should be. Given Mr. Boehner's record so far — support for means-testing Social Security (an idea that Heritage also backs), taking to the woodshed the congressman who called the president's treatment of BP a shakedown, publicly indicating willingness to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for those making more than $250,000 a year — this idea may get some traction.

A New York Times article complains that some of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's work-related expenses at the Harvard Club have been paid for by volunteer donors to the New York City Police Foundation rather than, as the Times apparently would prefer, the New York taxpayers compelled by government force to pay taxes. The Times article describes the club as "a rarefied spot in Midtown Manhattan whose membership is exclusively for those with Harvard degrees."

The non-profit libertarian law firm the Institute for Justice has released a new video explaining a series of new reports it has issued on the government-imposed hurdles facing would-be entrepreneurs.

Economic Policies for the 21st Century has an editorial:

At a recent town hall meeting, the President explained that 85% of the revenue lost from extending current tax rates would go to the benefit of "millionaires and billionaires." In a recent speech in Richmond, Virginia, the President went a step further, claiming that the extension of the top two tax rates would benefit people who are "typically millionaires and billionaires." The President's obvious intention is to distract voters from the rather large swath of income between $208,850 and $1 million and instead point to the benefits received by what he calls the "wealthiest Americans."

Thomas Sowell's latest column, about "tax cuts for the rich," is one of his all-time best. On how Andrew Mellon, who was Treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932, understood the Laffer Curve before Arthur Laffer was even born:

Mellon said, "It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue for the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates."

Writes Mr. Sowell:

When one of the Rockefellers died, Mellon discovered that his estate included $44 million in tax-exempt bonds, compared to $7 million in Standard Oil securities, even though Standard Oil was the source of the Rockefeller fortune.

For the country as a whole, the amount of money tied up in tax-exempt securities was estimated to be three times as large as the federal government's expenditures and more than half as large as the national debt.

On the eve of the midterm elections, the giant mutual fund firm Vanguard has weighed in on the side of President Obama and the Democrats with a blog post by a company official declaring that without President Obama's stimulus bill, Americans might be facing a scenario of "unemployment of 15% or more. A Dow that would have fallen 75% off its peak—to 4,000 or less—before recovering to a level much below today's. An economic recovery that might not yet have begun. And finally a foreclosure crisis even larger than our present one."

The author of the post acknowledges that it is a "guess," leaving Vanguard investors (including this one) wondering why company officials are publicly guessing about politics and public policy so close to an election.

"The idea that no third stimulus was needed seems mistaken," the Vanguard official writes, acknowledging, however, that the spending bill "could have included more tax cuts relative to spending (though the tax cuts would have been best targeted at low-income households, who are more likely to spend the money)."

A former mayor of New York, Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, writes:

I predict a Republican victory of tsunami proportions on November 2^nd.

For the last six months in various public forums, I have said that Republicans will take both the House and Senate.

Most political observers, citing statistics from various states, continue to say that, while it appears certain that the House will go Republican, there are too few Senate seats in play for a Republican takeover. Further, many pundits state that Democrats will preserve their control of the Senate because the Republican Party has undermined itself by fielding whacko and semi-whacko candidates from the "Tea Party" wing or otherwise offering inferior candidates, e.g., Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Linda McMahon in Connecticut and Carly Fiorina in California.

Without being able to cite statistics that support my view, I nevertheless predict the Republicans will also take the Senate. ....

In the new issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews Steven Rattner's book on the auto industry bailout/takeover, and writes, "there is no question that the auto bailout represents one of the signature accomplishments both of his career and of the Obama Administration. In August, G.M. posted its second quarterly profit in a row, its best result in three years. Chrysler, for its part, is now safely in the hands of Fiat, at least for the time being."

Citizens Against Government Waste has a YouTube video up aimed at capitalizing on public anxiety about China and American decline, not to mention taxes, spending, and "stimulus." Here it is:

Microsoft's Bill Gates and Google's Sergey Brin have both given money to defend a California law imposing greenhouse gas emission limits from a challenge in the form of a statewide ballot referendum, Bloomberg News reports. What the Bloomberg article doesn't say is that both men have alternative energy investments that would be affected by the law. Google is in the power meter business and the wind energy business, and Mr. Brin was reportedly an investor in Tesla, an electric car company. Bill Gates is an investor in TerraPower, a nuclear reactor business.

The New York Times has a front-page news article about how a lot of apartments in public housing projects need repairs and how it takes a long time and a lot of money to get the work done. The entire article is unburdened by any recognition whatsoever that a lot of people who don't live in public housing have things in their houses that they'd like to get fixed, too. But they may not have the money to make the repairs, or the power to tax others to fund them.

The subtext of the Times article seems to be that those people who live in private housing should be taxed more so that those people who live in public housing don't have to wait so long for needed repairs.

Mickey Kaus, who has moved his blog from Slate to his Senate campaign site to Newsweek, notices a political interview with Maureen "Moe" Tucker, drummer for the Velvet Underground:

No country can provide all things for all citizens. There comes a point where it just isn't possible, and it's proven to be a failure everywhere it's been tried. I am not oblivious to the plight of the poor, but I don't see any reason/sense to the idea that everyone has to have everything, especially when the economy is so bad. I see that philosophy as merely a ploy to control....