THESE PEOPLE HAVE NO SENSE OF IRONY: Team Obama to Romney: Speak positively about Libya, or not at all.

They blew it, they lied about it, and now they don’t want you to talk about it. But that’s not working out very well for them, is it?

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Television & Video.

THEY’LL BE LIVE-BLOGGING THE VP DEBATE at the Boston Herald. And Ann Althouse will be live-blogging, too.

UPDATE: Liveblogging at Cato, too.

Also, tracking Twitter.

BILL WHITTLE: Firewall: Bewitched!

OBSERVING GERMANY’S HYPERINFLATION ANNIVERSARY. “In 1920, a loaf of bread soared to $1.20, and then in 1921 it hit $1.35. By the middle of 1922 it was $3.50. At the start of 1923 it rocketed to $700 a loaf. Five months later a loaf went for $1200. By September it was $2 million. A month later it was $670 million (wide spread rioting broke out). The next month it hit $3 billion. By mid month it was $100 billion. Then it all collapsed.” That’s how this kind of thing happens . . . slowly, and then all at once.

Hey, there’s always Dave Voda’s book.

VIDEO: Roger L. Simon, James Taranto, Ron Radosh, Roger Kimball, and Claudia Rosett, from last night’s First Annual Walter Duranty Awards.

(Transcript of speeches online here.)

MY FOUNDATION FOR GENDER EQUITY IN HEALTH CARE WILL ADDRESS THIS: Why Men Should Get Annual Sexual Health Exams. Right now women get more than their share of America’s health dollar. Now that it’s a government program, we’ll have to even that out. That means more for men, less for women. It’s only fair! “Although women tend to love the notion of government control more than men do, it is women who will be told they’ll have to cut back. On treatments. And years. You know we’ve been taking more than our share.”

ANDREW MALCOLM: Actually tonight’s big Ryan-Biden debate is no BFD. “Part of the reason, of course, has to do with the irrelevance of the No. 2 office most of the time.” Yeah, if voters cared that much who was a heartbeat away, Biden wouldn’t be where he is now.

Though — hilariously, in retrospect — he was added to the ticket in 2008 to bring foreign-policy “heft.” How’s that worked out?

ANNALS OF THE ACADEMIC ONE-PERCENTERS. “When ranked by endowment per student, the top 10 colleges have more money at their disposal to spend on each student than most Americans will earn in their lifetimes. And according to the Institute of Education Sciences, their total endowments compare favorably with the gross domestic products of several sovereign nations.”

BIGOTRY: Scott Brown Staffer Heckled By Elizabeth Warren Supporters For Being Gay.

BIDEN PROPOSES SOCIAL SECURITY FREEZE: “While this program is severe, it is the only proposal that will halt the upward spiral of deficits. . . . Within the next 12 to 18 months this country will face an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions if Congress refuses to take decisive action on the deficits that we face.”

Okay, that was Biden back in 1984. But if he calls Ryan an “extremist” on deficits, Ryan may want to mention this. Upside for Joe: In the accompanying photo, he still has hair, kind of.

WELL, IT IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: It’s Time People Realized That The Drudge Report Is A Major Media Property Worth Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars:

In short, the Drudge Report is almost as big a digital media property as The New York Times.

That’s absolutely staggering.

Why?

Because The New York Times is produced by ~1,200 journalists. The Drudge Report is produced by one.

And how about economics?

Economically, The Drudge Report is much smaller than The New York Times. But that’s in part by design. And, importantly, The Drudge Report is likely highly profitable, which is not something that can always be said for The New York Times.

The Drudge Report doesn’t have a salesforce. It works with a firm called Intermarkets to sell the ad units on its pages. The Drudge Report contains general news, often with a political slant, which means The Drudge Report likely gets relatively low revenue-per-page. (Say, $1.50 per 1000 pages). But The Drudge Report has a lot of pageviews.

Assuming The Drudge Report gets $1.50 per 1000 pages and has 1 billion pageviews per month, The Drudge Report should be generating revenue of $15-$20 million a year.

That doesn’t sound like much, but, importantly, Drudge has very low tech, editorial, and sales costs.

So almost all of that is profit.

Assuming The Drudge Report pays the full corporate tax rate on those earnings, the business probably generates $10-$15 million of after-tax profit per year.

So, how much is The Drudge Report worth?

Media properties generally trade at a 15x-25x multiple of earnings, or a 4x-5x multiple of revenue, depending on the growth rate of the business and the level of profitability.

A range of 15x-25x earnings for the current incarnation of The Drudge Report, therefore, would produce an estimated value of $150 million to $375 million.

Plus the sustainable distribution method the Drudge Report uses to transmit its news is much healthier for the environment than the Times’ FDR-era legacy approach.

THAT WINNING COMBINATION.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Vital Signs Chart: Paychecks Losing Ground. “Average hourly earnings were $19.80 in August, adjusted for inflation, the same as August 2011 and down slightly from the beginning of 2009.”

HATING BREITBART: Director Andrew Marcus discusses his documentary look at Andrew Breitbart in a 23-minute audio interview at Ed Driscoll.com, including his struggles with the (Chris Dodd-led) MPAA to receive a PG-13 rating, and get the documentary out into theaters before the November election.

(Bumped.)

THIS SHOULD STOP JITTERS ABOUT HIS MORMONISM: Among people who care about such things.  Billy Graham endorses Mitt.  (Hat Tip Daniel Blatt of Gay Patriot who assures me this is a good thing.)

PRIVATIZING THE SPACE PROGRAM IS A GREAT IDEA, BUT USING IT FOR CRONY CAPITALISM? NOT SO MUCH: The Washington Examiner finds problems, questions in NASA’s insider deal for a hefty Obama contributor.

DISGRACEFUL: Stephanie Cutter: Benghazi Is Only an Issue ‘Because of Romney and Ryan.’

Ouch: Reaction: “The campaign that spent the week talking Big Bird is attacking opponents for wanting to discuss national security.”

Related: Stephanie Cutter just said Team Obama belief aloud: 4 dead Americans are just fodder for political spin. Bumps in the road.

DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ TO PIERS MORGAN: How dare you call our entirely discredited cover story on Benghazi false, or something:

Guy Benson e-mails me to explain the “un-American” reference from Morgan, which puzzled me.

FYI, the reason Piers Morgan brought up “un-American” is that a few seconds before that clip starts, DWS was calling Republicans un-American for asking tough questions about the Benghazi attack.  She started the patriotism games…Morgan was just hoisting her by her own petard.

That makes it much more clear.  And even better.

Or as John Hayward of Human Events Tweeted, “By Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s logic, every Dem who questioned Iraqi WMDs is un-American.”

Keep flucking that chicken, Debbie.

MORE ON THOSE SHADY CREDIT-CARD COLLECTIONS: Priebus asks for FBI investigation of Obama’s online donations. “’The President’s campaign committee does not use the industry standard practices to guard against receiving fraudulent or excessive contributions via the internet… I therefore call on the Department of Justice to investigate this troubling pattern of behavior by the President’s campaign,’ said Priebus in a Oct. 11 letter to Holder.”

BUILDING A BRIDGE TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION: A bridge to the past: The old-fashioned and obsolete economics of Obama and Biden, as explored by James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute.

HEH: Richard Grenell: Will reporters come out of Obama closet on ‘Coming Out Day?’

UNDERBUSSING REDUX: As Glenn noted earlier, the Obama camp has been reduced to calling liberal bloggers the “Tinfoil Hat Crowd.”

Recall in late August of 2010, when the White House knew their party was flailing away before the midterms, they unloaded on “The Professional Left” — i.e., core liberals who originally put them in power:

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

Curiously, this was dubbed an “unexpected” development by the Huffington Post at the time. Perhaps they simply needed to watch more PJTV:

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FUNNY POLL GAMES in Ohio?

WE NEED TO PUSH BACK AGAINST THIS CRAP RIGHT NOW: Saudi Arabia calls for an international body to censor the Internet. It might help if the United States government spent more time defending free speech than condemning and even arresting American citizens who practice it.