MAYBE THIS IS WHY MY MALE FRIENDS AREN’T AS CRAZY OVER THE ELECTION: Study Finds Men Can “Endure” More Pain than Women.

INDEED: 5 Serious Questions On Smoking Gun Benghazi Cable That Deserve Answers. “We deserve better than a dog & pony show after November 6.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Hurricane Sandy and the Perils of Nanny State Governance.

The New York Times notes that scientists and flood experts have been warning about the risks of flooding in New York for years and have suggested everything from levees to floodgates in New York Harbor to minimize potential damage. Yet neither the city nor the state government has taken serious steps to act on these suggestions. . . . Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

The problem with nanny state governance isn’t just that it’s intrusive. It isn’t just that it stifles business with over-regulation, and it isn’t just that it empowers busybodies and costs money. It’s that it distracts government from the really big jobs that it ought to be doing.

Indeed.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WASTE: Battery firm’s bankruptcy threatens high-end carmaker.

GOVERNMENT UNIONS AND THE DOWNFALL OF ILLINOIS: “If this sort of bribery occurred in private business, people would go to jail. In Illinois government, it’s standard practice.”

I’M SO TIRED OF ATTITUDES LIKE HERS: Longoria does her part to put the ‘twit’ in ‘Twitter.’

Longoria — and the man she’s campaigning for — still have some explaining to do. Does either of them believe what the original tweet implies? Because it implies several things, none of which reflect well on liberals or Democrats that believe such nonsense.

1. All women should think the same.

2. All minorities should think the same.

3. Any woman or minority that doesn’t think like the majority of women and minorities is, by definition, “stupid.”

Ms. Longoria — and the man you’re campaigning for — as a first generation immigrant from a country the Federal Government counts as Latin and, yes, female, let me inform you “stupid” doesn’t mean what you think it means.  I’d stake my IQ against yours any day, in public, in a duel to the pain.

2013: A TRIANGULATION ODYSSEY: Why Christie Sucked Up To Obama.

DISASTER RELIEF: Comcast offers free WiFi service in affected storm areas.

CABLES: Libya Storyline Still Crumbling. They just want to keep the lid on until Tuesday.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Holiday Electronics Gift List.

Also, today only: Up to 65% off on Firefly and other Joss Whedon classics. Love Whedon’s work, especially Firefly, but his recent political pronouncements in favor of Obama indicate that in real life, he’d be on the side of the Alliance.

INSTAVISION: The Future of Space Flight Under the Next President.

THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE MADE INCLUDE SAUSAGES, LAWS AND BUREAUCRACY: So naturally The Washington Examiner’s Watchdog special reporting team raised the hood on the bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Out popped a former soap opera starlet and beauty queen on the public payroll, friends helping friends get jobs, employees who rarely do any work, hiring senior executives without even pro forma background checks, and a culture that doesn’t know how not to spend more tax dollars. And that’s just for starters! Go here, here and here.

DEADBEAT CLUB: Women: NJ Senator Bob Menendez paid us for sex in the Dominican Republic — and we only got 20% of what he promised. Now that’s just tacky. Unlike Menendez, these women earn their pay.

Anyway, this should be a boost for Menendez’s opponent, Joe Kyrillos. After all, this proves that it was really Menendez:

“He lies,” she said of Menendez. “He says one thing and does another.”

The campaign ads write themselves!

And what is it about corrupt members of Congress and the Dominican Republic?

UPDATE: “Sen. Menendez… did you vote for Lily Ledbetter but then underpay your prostitutes?”

THREE STUPID RESPONSES TO HURRICANE SANDY — and Every Other Disaster You Can Think Of, from Nick Gillespie of Reason.com.

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s New Normal: 4 More Years of Job Declines.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Cancer Breakthroughs Meet Market Realities.

When analyzed at the molecular level, a cancer that has traditionally been viewed as a single disease commonly fragments into many different subtypes, each possibly requiring a different treatment. There are now tests for about 200 different such abnormalities, which may occur by themselves or in combination.

“We should realize first that every patient is different,” says Tsimberidou. “We cannot treat all patients with, say, colorectal cancer the same or think, for instance, that all metastatic liver disease is the same. In addition to the standard diagnostic procedures, we should perform a more refined tumor molecular analyses to better characterize every patient’s disease, and we have to tailor the treatment to the specific tumor and patient characteristics.”

The molecular understanding of cancer means both good news and bad news for improving treatment.

The good news is that more cures should be possible, with less waste from giving the wrong patients drugs that won’t work in their particular cases. That potentially could save money and significantly reduce suffering.

Faster, please.

GREG LUKIANOFF ON the prevalence of censorship on campus.

BILL WHITTLE: A “Short” List of Why Not To Vote for Obama.

A REPORT FROM MANHATTAN:

The traffic in the blackout areas of Manhattan is lawless in the most literal sense: the traffic lights aren’t working, so the law cannot be applied as usual. But “lawless” doesn’t seem to be a fitting description; the driving seems better-behaved than usual. We’re so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it’s easy to assume that without the rules, everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that’s never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics.

Actually, there’s a fair amount of research indicating that too many traffic rules can make us less safe, by causing drivers to think and communicate less.

GREAT ARTISTIC DECISION, KID — BUT DON’T GET COCKY: George Lucas Just Saved Star Wars by Firing George Lucas.

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL ON SOCIAL-MEDIA TRIUMPHALISM, AND SOCIAL MEDIA’S LIMITS. “The corrective power of platforms such as Twitter reaches only so far. Once established, media myths are exceedingly difficult to uproot. These myths have amply demonstrated that they can withstand the power of social media.”

MAYBE THIS HELPS EXPLAIN WHY OBAMA SPENDS SO MUCH MORE ON STATE DINNERS: Michael Walsh is deputy chief of protocol, a key cog in White House state dinner planning and payment. He’s also a founding partner with Bryan Raffanelli in Raffanelli Event Management, another key cog and one that gets paid. The Washington Post not long ago called this duo the capital’s “new power couple.” The Washington Examiner has questions of a quite different sort about their relationship.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: “Can we leave, because Romney is in town and I want to go shoot him.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Emails show Obama admin used DOE loan money to help Harry Reid’s 2010 campaign.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

SYSTEM-HARDENING: Should The Northeast Bury Its Power Lines?