GOLF: Lining Up A Putt: The Stimpmeter.

MORE ON THE IMPENDING BACON SHORTAGE.

I’d say it’s time to stockpile your tactical bacon. Or, if you prefer, Yoder’s canned bacon. Because you certainly don’t want to run out of bacon!

THE WARREN BECLOWNMENT: Candidate who used High Cheekbones and Pow Wow Chow Indian stereotypes upset at people who used Indian stereotypes.

That sounds like a Robert Ludlum title, doesn’t it? The Warren Beclownment. But it’s a story too crazy for fiction.

CNN’S PIERS MORGAN: AHMADINEJAD IS CHARMING. But of course: From Castro and Hugo Chavez, to Kim Jong-il, to Arafat and “Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot,” to being in bed with Saddam Hussein, who are the overseas tyrants that CNN anchorpersons don’t find charming?

UPDATE: “Irony: Ahmadinejad speaks out for women’s rights at UN General Assembly.”

Audrey Hepburn left the UN building a long, long time ago.

PICTURES FROM A BEATLES-THEMED WEDDING.

ARE TINY HOUSES the next big thing? Best bit: “They knew that moving two children, a dog and a cat into a 168-square foot space would be a challenge, though it would also eliminate the need for a mortgage and cut their utility costs.” Ya think?

But there’s that mortgage thing: “”Living mortgage-free has given us the freedom to make decisions based on what will make us happy, not what we have to do to pay the mortgage.” That’s the advantage of not taking on debt, whether it’s student loans or mortgages. People forget that.

I’VE GOT A COLUMN IN TODAY’S NEW YORK POST: “It’s a hell of a thing when the nominee of the far-left Green Party espouses a stronger work ethic than the President of the United States. But that’s what we’ve come to.”

(Bumped).

STILL NUMBER ONE! NFIB v. Sebelius: Five Takes, is still #1 on SSRN’s Top Downloads list.

RIP CROONER ANDY WILLIAMS, 84.

AHMADINEJAD CALLS FOR “NEW WORLD ORDER” AT UN:   The mainstream media is commenting that the Iranian President’s UN remarks today were “tame” compared to previous years.  Really?????  He overtly called for a New World Order, criticizing capitalism and its sins.  Seems to me his ambitious have grown, not subsided.  His principal aim is no longer just Israel but western society as a whole.

PAUL RYAN HAS A COOL SENSE OF HUMOR, riffing on somebody else’s remark that his future political career will require that he “wash the stench of Romney off of him.” He’s saying things on the campaign bus like “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.” But he has political antagonists, and if they get humor they’ll pretend not to. It’s a shame. I like quirky humor!

We’re seeing the same thing with those who are acting like Romney’s an idiot for saying Michigan “trees are just the right height” and why is it that airplane windows “don’t open.” Politicians can’t come right out and tell you you’re dumb if you don’t get their joke. They’ve got too much to lose, and they can’t play cute games with your mind like Madonna with her “Black Muslim in the White House” remark. (That last link is a self-link to my blog, which means I’m self-promoting — self-promoting in the context of talking about the Grande Dame of Self-Promotion, Madonna — and which also means we’re carrying on a conversation about all this in the comments section.)

ADDED: I misread that. Ryan didn’t make those jokes. The report that he said that was itself a joke. I like those jokes! Oddly, the point of the writer at the first link — Tobin Harshaw — is that Ryan’s antagonists are so eager to attack him that they don’t recognize that fake quotes are fake. But they aren’t that fake. They could be real humor. Obviously, there’s trouble processing humor. Isn’t Harshaw missing the humor of that kittens-on-Mars letter writer?

AND: I like the way Drudge is putting it: “MEDIA ‘SATIRE’ HIT PIECE ON PAUL RYAN BACKFIRES…/O’Donnell, Krugman ‘fooled’…” Drudge is, I think, insinuating that Politico’s Roger Simon intended to be misunderstood, for the Ryan quotes to be believed, and then to reveal that it was satire after the damage was done.

PLUS: Fake quotes once released take on a life of their own. Think of “I can see Russia from my house.”

IRAN SAYS IT WILL BOYCOTT next year’s Oscars because of that Mohamed video everyone’s rioting over. I’d say “whatever,” but this year’s best foreign film award went to A Separation, which is Iranian. That film is magnificent. It’s not about politics, but I did enjoy the jabs at the government and the country’s religious zealots that were too subtle for the bovine-like censors to notice.

A LOOK AT families that have run family businesses for over 100 years.

GOING AFTER THE SOURCE: Republicans mount attack against election fraud within Chicago. “An effort led by suburban mom Sharon Meroni to fill every empty Republican election judge position in Chicago and Cook County (there are separate election authorities) would thwart politics-as-usual, in which Democrats typically fill the empty Republican positions. . . . The position, which pays $170 for the day, is open to anyone who lives in the county; you can apply via the Cook County GOP website here.”

MORE INJUSTICE AT JUSTICE:   Is it appropriate for high level officials at the US Department of Justice to drop a lawsuit against a city in exchange for the City’s agreement to drop a lawsuit against the feds?  This is the question now being raised against DOJ civil rights chief Thomas Perez, who pressured the City of St. Paul, MN, to drop a high stakes lawsuit Magner v. Gallagher,  pending before the Supreme Court, in exchange for DOJ dropping a high-dollar False Claims Act lawsuit against St. Paul.

The Magner v. Gallagher lawsuit was potentially explosive because, for the first time, it would have forced the Supreme Court to decide whether the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA) could be violated by a mere showing of “disparate impact.”  In Magner, rental property owners argued that the City of Saint Paul’s “aggressive enforcement” of its housing codes affected minorities disproportionately because renters are disproportionately black, so requiring landlords to meet the housing code will increase their costs and decrease the number of units available to rent to minority tenants.

The question for the Supreme Court was whether such a disparate impact claim–where there is statistical evidence of impact on a certain race, but zero evidence of intent to discriminate— are recognized under the FHA.  Most Court watchers predicted a ruling in favor of the City that disparate impact claims were impermissible under the FHA.  This result was scary to the current DOJ, because it would put an end to its recent strategy of  bringing FHA claims against mortgage companies based on mere statistical evidence that the lenders’ policies statistically affect minorities more than whites.

Bottom line?  We won’t know the answer to this important question about the reach of the Fair Housing Act because Magner was so threatening to the current DOJ that it was willing to do anything– including dropping a very promising, big-dollar False Claims Act– in exchange for St. Paul’s dropping the Magner case.

Is this the way we want our DOJ to behave– to do anything to avoid getting answers on critically important legal questions in order to further the President’s policy goals of helping minorities?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ranking colleges by payback vs. tuition. “Among many folks who fixate on big-name northeastern liberal-arts schools, the Georgia Institute of Technology flies under the reputational radar. Even its president, G.P. Peterson, goes by the unassuming, guy-next-door nickname of ‘Bud.’ But based on our Payback Score, the school deserves a higher profile — and some bragging rights. After all, it’s offering the best academic deal in America. . . . All of Georgia Tech’s neighbors at the top of the heap are also public universities; indeed, state schools have historically dominated our Payback Scorecard, and this year, they hold the top 17 slots. At midcareer, our public school graduates earn less in absolute dollars than their private-college counterparts, but as a proportion of their tuition, they’re pulling down 58% more than Ivy grads, and 85% more than alumni of non-Ivy private schools. For many middle- and upper-middle income families, that translates into a lighter economic burden — all the more important in an economy where salaries for college grads overall have been stagnant.”

This is a useful metric, but remember that those average salaries are averages. You want to prepare for the possibility that the market will shift, or you won’t do as well as you expect. My main advice — don’t take out a lot of loans, even to go to Georgia Tech. I think there’s a little bit of a STEM bubble going on right now. It’s not bad to study STEM subjects, but don’t get carried away. What looks good now might not in four or five years, but if you borrow, the debt will still be there.

Broke is broke.  In Spain or here, the consequences can only be avoided so long.  Aid will only delay the reckoning.  And the reckoning always has to get paid in the end.

COMPETENCE: Sources say intelligence agencies knew within a day that al Qaeda affiliates were behind the attacks in Benghazi, Libya—they even knew where one of the attackers lived.

But that didn’t stop them from scapegoating a convenient filmmaker. Apology time yet?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, reader Bayard Rucker joins in the photoshop fun, inspired by Obama’s comments on The View and his U.N. speech:

IT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE:  A must-read editorial by the Wall Street Journal today about Iranian ambitions to “eliminate” Israel.  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the UN today, on Yom Kippur.  The startling truth, as the WSJ editors realize, is this:

“The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.”

When you’ve got nothing else, you run a dirty “whisper and rumor” campaign.  Don’t let them get away with it.

HISTORY: How well did the pollsters do predicting party turnout in 2010?

DOES TOM FRIEDMAN KNOW ABOUT THIS? More Riots In Chinese Factories.

IT REALLY IS LIKE THE HUNGER GAMES: “The average wage in the D.C. metro region has skyrocketed relative to the average of metro regions.”

VIDEO: Liquid Nitrogen and 1500 Ping Pong Balls.

UPDATE: “Video has been removed by user.” Bummer. I wonder why? It was cool.