THE MYTH OF THE LILLY LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT:  This great op-ed by Victoria Toensing in the Wall Street Journal explains why the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act–which has featured so prominently in the presidential debates– is much ado about nothing (or darn close to it).  Says Toensing:

Mr. Obama brags that the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act bestowed equal-pay rights for women. The act, he has said, “is a big step toward making sure every worker,” male and female, “receives equal pay for equal work.” No, it was a teensy step. It merely changed how the statute of limitations is calculated.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Has Anna Wintour banned designers from dressing Ann Romney? Why the fashion industry appears to be snubbing Mitt’s wife.

Anna’s probably still peeved over receiving The Duranty Prize for her slobbering coverage of that “Rose in the Desert,” Syria’s Asma al-Assad.

FACTCHECK.ORG: Obama’s Inflated Jobs Claim. “In the ad, the president says ‘over 5 million new jobs’ while the figure ‘5.2 million’ appears on screen. But that’s a doubly misleading figure.”

OH, THE HORROR, THE HORROR OF UPPER EAST SIDE HALLOWEEN DÉCOR: The New York Times gets the vapors* over Big Apple Halloween decorations:

At no point is the East Side’s submission to child-centeredness more aggressively in evidence than in the days leading up to Oct. 31; we are now in the era of what one Park Avenue exile calls “a hedge-fund Halloween.” By this she means the relatively new tradition among town-house owners, mostly between Fifth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, to appoint the stoops and facades of their buildings as if someone had asked them to enact a particular 0.01 percent nightmare: “Imagine that you’d failed to acquire some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Pretend you lived in Brooklyn instead, and not in Cobble Hill but in Dyker Heights, that distant precinct famous for its polyvinyl snowmen and street-clogging paeans to Christmas.”

In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle exclaimed with a straight face, “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party.” For the dowager Gray Lady, the public exuberance of Halloween is evidently worse. (And as the last sentence quoted above hints, don’t even get them started on Christmas The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.)

* But then, what doesn’t the Margaret Dumont of Eighth Avenue get the vapors over these days?

RELATED: School Officials: No Halloween Celebrations In Phoenixville District This Year, CBS-Philadelphia reports.

CRIME: Florida jail officials considering tattoo database: Tool would help investigators search for unidentified suspects.

See, I never got this. Every cop show I watched as a kid has them ask a witness: “Any identifying marks? Tattoos?” If I were planning a life of crime, I wouldn’t get any ink. Then again, these are the guys who are already in jail, so maybe they’re the dumb criminals . . . .

“INVEST” IN EDUCATION:  And it will apparently invest in you.  Ever notice how often President Obama and his minions tout “investing” in education (translated: spending more $$$$).  Besides the incredible return-on-investment of Robo-squirrels, it seems there’s another, quite literal, payoff:  Educators and their giant PACs will thank you by contributing big money to your campaign.

Yep, the biggest contributors to Obama’s campaign– of all donors— include the University of California (#1) and Harvard University (#4). But that doesn’t mean there’s a “liberal bias” in higher education or anything.  Nah– conspiracy theory.

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WELL, THAT’S A POLITE WAY OF PUTTING IT: Bob Woodward: Obama ‘mistaken’ on sequester.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: Nigel Farage: “The euro-zone is in a very dark place; economically, socially, and politically.”

MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION? A shot across Miss October Surprise’s bow.

OBAMA NOW TRYING OUT SEINFELD SHTICK? Well, it’s been a Show About Nothing for quite some time.

UPDATE: No B+ for the comedy stylings of Barry Obama from television comedy writer/producer Rob Long: “If you pitched that in my writers’ room, you’d be wondering about your job security…Obama is starting to stink like a loser. And there’s no way to come back from that.”

THE SICKENING TRUTH about Wind Farm Syndrome.

TEA PARTIERS LEAVE PLACES CLEANER THAN WHEN THEY ARRIVED. Obama Supporters Leave Huge Mess Behind In Ohio.

IF YOUR ONLY HOPE IS GLORIA ALLRED, you’re pretty desperate. And this reeks of desperation.

UPDATE (Ed): Time for an Obama surrogate to play what Ann Coulter described back in August as “Obama’s Signature Move: Unsealing Private Records.”

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Hey, why hasn’t the L.A. Times released the Khalidi tape?

The only answer can be that releasing it would hurt Obama, because it’s bad. Right?

CHANGE: Washington Post/ABC News Poll: Romney 49, Obama 48.

WHY EVERYTHING FAILS: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually. “Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.”

BUSTING SOME education myths.

DEMOCRAT JEWISH ASSEMBLYMAN STUMPS FOR ROMNEY:  Yep, you read that right:  A Brooklyn Assemblyman– and Democrat–has traveled to Florida to stump for . . . Romney.  He explains his reasoning:

Israel is under the gun. Israel is the target of Iran. Israel’s existence is being threatened. And Obama doesn’t have time to meet with the Israeli PM? It’s insulting. It’s degrading. This president scares me. I’m a Democrat, but not a knee-jerk Democrat. I’m only loyal to America and the survival of Israel.

Could there be a Jewish preference cascade forming for Romney?  The pack mentality is loosening among many “groups” thought to “belong” to the Democrats.

I BELIEVE THAT 2012 WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE YEAR THAT VAGINAS JUMPED THE SHARK: Wife’s Dying Wish Is To Have Vagina Replica Engraved On Her Headstone.

L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI: Karl Rove on Obama’s Debate Performance: “He Looked Like Louis XIV Masquerading As President” (with video).

And sounded like it too – although Obama’s “This Nation. Me.” moment certainly sounded better in the original French.

I’VE GOT A PIECE IN POPULAR MECHANICS ON THOSE ITALY SCIENTIST CONVICTIONS: We Can’t Predict Earthquakes And We Shouldn’t Scapegoat Scientists. (Bumped).

OUR PRO-TORTURE PRESIDENT: Barack Obama’s Department of Justice Railroads CIA Torture Whistleblower Into Reduced Guilty Plea.

President Obama has said that waterboarding is torture, as has Attorney General Eric Holder, who runs the DOJ. Given that, combined with Obama’s repeated insistence that his administration must encourage whistleblowing, you would think that the administration, led by the DOJ, would celebrate a CIA agent who exposes such practices, and seek to punish those who carried them out.

Instead, we have the reverse.

Yeah, it’s like all that stuff was just a bunch of malarkey to fool the rubes or something. All the Democratic apologists who are still riding Obama’s bus might want to rethink. Oh, who am I kidding — they’ll want to avoid thinking about this at all. And, I predict, they’ll succeed entirely. Probably while saying something bigoted about Mormons.

“FIRED UP, READY TO MOPE!”

RELATED: Obama’s Pity Party Begins.

UNDER MY PLAN, ENERGY COSTS WILL NECESSARY SKYROCKET: California gas prices set record yesterday.

Plus – two papers in one; the above L.A. Times article tries to explain to readers why they’re paying so much for gas. But in 2008, the paper ran an article from then-regular columnist Joel Stein (he of the “I don’t support our troops” fame), expounding on “The joy of $8.00 gas.”

Less than $3.50 to go now in California to reach those European level prices that both the L.A. Times and Obama’s energy secretary desired back then.

OHIO VOTER TELLS BIDEN: Enjoy Your Last Couple of Months as Vice President.