ROMNEY’S LAWYER: Yeah, sure, unseal that divorce testimony if you want. Big deal. Kinda anticlimactic, eh, Gloria?

ANN ALTHOUSE: “The NYT attempts an anecdotal argument against the law that lets you defend yourself in your home. The anecdote simply does not convey the message the Times obviously believes it conveys.”

Plus, from the comments: “Maybe the Times should focus its concern closer to home. NYPD cops shoot unarmed people all the time. They get medals for it.” It’s okay because they work for Bloomberg. If Rudy were still mayor, the Times would muster at least a modicum of outrage.

SUDAN ACCUSES ISRAEL of bombing an arms factory in Khartoum. Israeli officials offer no comment.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction.”

Sounds like a serious diversity problem, but one that no one will want to address.

Related: Groupthink In Academia.

WELL, BUT NOBODY DIED IN WATERGATE: With 2 words, Drudge evokes Watergate for Obama’s Libya troubles.

Related: White House e-mails blow up its Libya cover story.

And why haven’t we heard from General Petraeus?

ISLAMISTS IN MALI ban music. These creeps aren’t run of the mill Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re obviously Al Qaeda. France is about to go in there and kick their asses. Good for France! It’s nice to see we’re not the lone globocop after all.

WELL, WHEN YOU’RE RELYING ON GLORIA ALLRED TO BE YOUR SAVIOR. . . . : Politico: Democrats see Obama agenda release as a desperation move, too.

Say, speaking of sealed records, why hasn’t the L.A. Times released the Khalidi tapes?. . .

Related: Rasmussen: All Tied in Ohio. “What had been a 49/48 narrow edge for Obama a week earlier has now become a 48/48 tie with less than two weeks to go.”

TEJU COLE: Why Is Lynching So Common In Nigeria? The mob happens when people don’t trust the state to provide justice.

LIZ PEEK: Why Romney Wants Public Jobs to Meet Performance Goals.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: New Front in Illinois Blue Civil War.

You could probably make a pretty good case that Illinois is ground zero of the collapse of the blue model, which is probably why Democratic Governor Pat Quinn has been looking to cut costs anywhere he can. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, Quinn has found, largely due to opposition from Democratic lawmakers and unions.

His latest cost-cutting plan, which would close seven state prisons and send their prisoners to nearby facilities, will also likely face stiff opposition. Quinn argues that the drop in juvenile detention rates will make it possible for the state to cut back on prisons, but unions and Democratic legislators with prisons in their districts have pledged to block the plans.

But of course.

HARMLESS MALFUNCTION IN NORTH CAROLINA: Guilford Co. voters say ballot cast for Romney came up Obama on machine. So, when voting be very careful.

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Farewell to algebra” . . . for minority kids? “I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my posts about (government-approved) lower educational standards for minority kids. Is it possible that the common core standards will similarly lower the bar, this time for math performance?”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Kindle Daily Deal.

BYRON YORK: Romney, not Obama, shows concern for nation’s poor. “There’s an odd imbalance that few have noticed in this presidential campaign. In the midst of a continuing economic downturn, one candidate talks regularly about poverty, and the other doesn’t. The one who does is the Republican, Mitt Romney. . . . In speech after speech since then, Romney has included the nation’s poverty rate in his case against Obama. . . . In contrast, President Obama rarely utters the word, and usually not in a campaign context.”

Well, you can see why Obama doesn’t want to bring the subject up.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Mitt Romney Shows In Debates He Can Replace Obama.

PHIL BOWERMASTER: Robots Will Steal Your Job.

Some will argue that, based on history, only luddites and the technologically (or economically) ignorant fear a machine takeover of the full human employment space. The “threat” of automation has never panned out. So far. Then again, machines are getting smarter and faster at an exponential rate; we are not. So it could be that we will all end up being yoga instructors, experiencing a transition to a whole new economic model, one wherein we are increasingly employed in the lucrative field of value-added intermediation — filling the gaps the machines can’t.

On the other hand, machine capabilities may improve so fast that they leave very little gap for us to intermediate. Or there might be limited economic value in the gaps we can fill. The possibility of a truly painful transition is out there and it’s very real.

In the long run, however, there is an exponential trend that favors us. The overall human condition is improving exponentially, and has been for some time. Vast improvements in machine capability are just a subset of, and contributing factor towards, that overall trend. In fact, it may turn out that we need these machines — and their ability to do everything we can do faster and better — to keep that trend going.

Some interesting times lie ahead. Everything may work out great, but I think Pistono’s advice about having a backup plan makes a lot of sense. In fact, maybe a couple or three backup plans wouldn’t be out of the question.

The book is Federico Pistono’s Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s Okay.

ANOTHER BRAIN DEATH MISDIAGNOSIS:  A 19 year-old woman in Denmark was pronounced brain dead and her parents consented to having her organs donated. The respirator was removed.  She didn’t die.  She is now undergoing rehab and may make a full recovery.

Think this is a one-off?  It’s not, as I explore in my book, The Law of Life & Death (Harvard 2011) [shameless plug, I know, but it’s relevant!].  As with the vegetative state, misdiagnosis is more common than the medical community admits–exactly how common is not known.  There is far more about the human brain that medical science just does not presently know.  For this reason, after researching my book, I am not an organ donor.

MUSIC AND THE POWER OF RHYTHM. That is, of course, the point behind trance music.

POST-MORTEM: The Five Lessons Of Benghazi. Including this: “It was lack of information sharing among federal agencies that was highlighted as one of the reasons behind the failure of the U.S. government to prevent attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Eleven years later, Benghazi illustrates that information sharing is still far from perfect.”

#CARING: Obama Campaign Refused To Hire Man Because He Had Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

GET READY FOR THE MALI INVASION: “France is sending drones to Mali while hundreds of Islamist fighters are coming in from across the Middle East, preparing to defend their safe haven.” Well, at least it’ll be a target-rich environment.

On the other hand, this looks like another fruit of that Smart Diplomacy we were promised: “Mali was first destabilized thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, which sent weapons and fighters streaming into the northern deserts, where they found little opposition from the government. Other Islamist fighters from the Middle East soon came flocking in to this sandy patch of ungoverned territory. Their ranks are reportedly bolstered by thousands of local child soldiers. The Libyan afterparty—the unintended consequences of NATO’s little Libya misadventure—sadly drags on well into the night.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists.

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade.

President Dronekiller was unavailable for comment.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FEDERALISM:  My op-ed (with David Rivkin) in the Wall Street Journal today about federalism and why it’s so important– to Americans of all political stripes.  We assert:

The idea that the Constitution grants only limited and enumerated powers and leaves the remainder to the states is foreign to those who believe that the national government should or even could address voters’ every concern. But contrary to the view widely shared by the political class, Washington—in particular, Congress—does not have the power to pass any law it wants in the name of the “general welfare.”

Politicians should take heed. Voters are increasingly focused on the proper role of government in society: Witness the rise of the tea party and unease over the massive debt caused by entitlements and other government handouts. The continuing loud objection to ObamaCare’s takeover of health care shows that voters want to preserve the Constitution’s architecture of limited federal power.

Federalism isn’t about “states’ rights.”  It’s about dividing power to better protect individual liberty.

ALPHA CENTAURI: Discovery Rekindles Wish For A Journey To The Stars.

For people who believe that interstellar voyages, either for people or for robots, are in the future, Alpha Centauri, a triple-star system that is the Sun’s nearest known neighbor, has always loomed large and close as a destination. It was the home of the mythical jungle world Pandora in James Cameron’s epic “Avatar,” for example.

The new planet doesn’t have jungles, giant blue-skinned cats or, as far as we know, the magical mineral unobtainium. It is, rather, a hellish unlivable blob of lava probably about the size of Earth, only four million short miles from the fires of Alpha Centauri B, the second brightest star in the system.

But if astronomers have learned anything over the last few years from devices like the Kepler satellite, it is that small planets come in packs. There is plenty of room in the system for more planets, habitable ones.

“I think we should drop everything and send a probe there,” said Sara Seager, an astronomer at M.I.T., echoing a call made last year by the exoplanet pioneer Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.

There is in fact somebody in charge of doing something just like that. Her name is Mae Jemison, a former astronaut, engineer, dancer, actor and entrepreneur. This year she, in conjunction with the nonprofit foundation Icarus Interstellar, won a $500,000 government grant to set up 100 Year Starship, an organization that is to come up with a business plan for interstellar travel.

Faster, please.