FORFEITURE ABUSE: Crime Pays For Police. “The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Tewksbury Police Department plan to take the entire property — worth well over $1 million — because on some 30 dates since 1994 guests staying at the motel have been arrested for drug-related crimes. During that period, the Caswells have rented more than 125,000 rooms. The government doesn’t claim that the Caswells are guilty of any crime. The government only says that federal civil forfeiture laws give them the power to take the property. . . . The case against the Caswells should be dropped because they are innocent of any wrongdoing. Local police departments shouldn’t be allowed to take property to fund their own budgets, which is exactly what the proceeds from the Caswells’ property would be used for. As this case makes clear, fair and impartial law enforcement cannot exist as long as government can take a person’s property without convicting them of a crime.”

Tar. Feathers. And obviously, you don’t want to locate a business in Tewksbury, or in Massachusetts, with this sort of thing going on. And given the involvement of the DEA, maybe you don’t even want to locate a business in the United States of America . . . .

HOW’S THAT “GREEN POLICY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Thanks in part to environmental rules, electricity bills are headed for double-digit increases.

CALIFORNIA: The Nightmare Scenario.

WHY WE KEEP COMING BACK to H.G. Wells’ visions of a dystopian future.

STACY MCCAIN: Mr. Cain, who is Lawrence O’Donnell to tell you how to be a black man?

I’M SURE THIS IS BECAUSE OF RACISM, SOMEHOW: New Poll Shows Obama Losing to Herman Cain.

HOPE: Corals Might Learn To Adapt To Warmer Seas.

A RADIATION DETECTOR for your iPhone. Or iPod touch.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: STARTING TO WORRY: “In the past year, presidents of several elite liberal arts colleges have questioned whether the financial model underpinning their institutions – one relying on high tuition costs and student aid paying for expensive instruction and residential life on beautiful campuses — is sustainable over the long term.”

USING RNA INTERFERENCE to block inflammation.

“BAD OPTICS:” Occupy Boston Hosts Rally For Terror Suspect.

ROBOT UPDATE: Boston Dynamics’ AlphaDog Quadruped Robot Prototype on Video. “Those weights that AlphaDog is carrying in a few of the clips weigh a total of 400 pounds (180 kilograms), and the robot will be able to carry that load up to 20 miles (30 kilometers) over the course of 24 hours without having to refuel. At the end of the running demo (just after the 45 second mark), the robot collapses into the safety frame like that simply because it ran out of room, not because of any kind of mechanical problem. And notice how two people pushing as hard as they can don’t phase AlphaDog in the least, and in the event that it does tip over for some reason, it has no trouble self-righting, which is a useful new feature.”

FORTUNATELY FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS, CAVEMEN HADN’T INVENTED FORMULA 409 YET: Prehistoric kids left marks in caves.

PHIL BOWERMASTER ON the pre-post-employment era. “What if post-industrial society is creating an infrastructure that just doesn’t need humans as much as it used to? Or at all? . . . We will have to come up with an organizational model for society that replaces employment as we have known it. Or such a model will have to emerge. ‘Like…what kind of a model?’ you ask. I wish I knew.”

SO SINCE I UPGRADED TO FIREFOX 7, the fan on my Macbook Air seems to be running louder (i.e. full speed) and more often. Anyone else notice this? I assume something’s loading the processor harder, but can the upgrade make that much difference?

THANKS TO WIKILEAKS, Judenrein. Pathetic.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: It’s okay to observe Columbus Day. “It is a holiday to celebrate diversity, not to commemorate the imperial outreach of Ferdinand and Isabella, a deeply regrettable couple who were notorious oath breakers, inquisitors and anti-Semites.”

HAVE NO FEAR COMRADES, IT IS MERELY A STRATEGIC REDEPLOYMENT TO SHORTEN OUR LINES: GM streamlines Volt plant, delays 2nd shift.

TOOK DOWN THE YOUTUBE EMBEDS. They were slowing pageloads for some reason.

CLAIM: More than 1 million fuel-cell vehicles will be sold by 2020. Two thoughts: (1) That’s not many, really, on a global scale; (2) It’s still vastly more than they’ve sold so far.

I drove a GM fuel-cell car a few years back. My impressions are here.

LES JONES: I just realized Saturday Night Live writers are terrorists.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Recession Nightmare: From Unemployed to Unemployable. “Long-term unemployment is becoming the defining feature of the Great Recession. As of September, the average time out of work stands at 40.5 weeks. Of the 14 million unemployed, about 45 percent have been jobless for more than six months, and over 70 percent of those have not worked in a year or more. No other business cycle since the 1930s has come close to matching the current experience.”

Related: We’ve had more productive depressions than this. “The U.S. now seems destined to live as countries in Europe did for the past several decades: ‘rich but struggling.'” Well, Europe was the model the Administration favored. This is what it looks like.

GOOD QUESTION: Where’s the evidence that Obama’s a policy genius?

Now I don’t think Wilson is flat-out wrong. Obama certainly does see himself as a policy wonk, and he’s surrounded himself with people who see the president in precisely the way the president likes to be seen. Funny how that works. Also Obama is one of the most zealous members of the cult of experts we’ve had in the White House in a very long time. . . .

So what’s my complaint? Simply this: Where’s the proof that Obama is a master of public policy? To be sure there’s ample proof that he’s a master at talking about public policy, describing the problems, summarizing the current thinking, regurgitating all of the reigning clichés and platitudes. But where’s the evidence that he’s actually good at public policy?

It’s a sincere question: What have been the truly innovative, groundbreaking or even unconventional big public policy ideas to come out of this administration? Are there any? Because from where I sit, it simply looks like Obama takes existing, conventional, liberal ideas – some of them very, very old – off the liberal pantry shelf and hawks them like it’s new inventory. Where’s the evidence that Obama’s “mastery” over public policy has translated itself into creative approaches? Not in the stimulus from what I can tell. Maybe there’s something impressive to tout in ObamaCare, but Obama didn’t actually have much to do with the crafting of ObamaCare – a fact Wilson acknowledges. Was his genius to be found in shoveling cash into Solyndra and other embarrassing white elephants? Was he the guiding intellect behind a green jobs program that has produced dozens of jobs in places where it was supposed to create thousands?

And if he’s such a genius about public policy, why did it take him so long to discover that there’s no such thing as “shovel ready jobs”? You don’t have to be a Jedi Master of public policy to have known that.

No, but if the Kennedy School starts offering a Jedi Master’s In Public Policy, sign me up.

HEH: Occupy the Democratic presidential primaries!