SUPREME COURT AGREES TO REVIEW ARIZONA “CITIZEN VOTER” LAW:  The law requires proof of U.S. citizenship in order to vote.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (a very liberal court) ruled Arizona’s law unconstitutional, reasoning that a federal law–the National Voter Registration Act of 1993–preempted state laws such as Arizona’s.  The AZ law is stayed pending the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision.  Oral arguments are expected in early 2013.

The chutzpah of Arizona, requiring voters to prove citizenship–how discriminatory!

CAMPAIGN OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Wag That Dog: Obama Administration Reveals Top Secret Plans To Surprise-Bomb Something, Somewhere, To World Media

HILLARY FALLS ON HER SWORD:  She tells CNN tonight, in an interview from Lima, Peru, “I take responsibility” for the confusion and misstatements after the 9/11 attacks on American installations in the Middle East, including Benghazi.  She insists the President and Vice President are not involved in security decisions.  Seriously????????

UPDATE (from Glenn): David Kirkham emails: “I think Hillary just zeroed out her campaign debt.”

Amazing how cynical they become once they’ve been exposed to politicians.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (From Glenn again): Reader Yolanda McVicker writes: “Well played by Hillary – the President and Vice President are not involved in security decisions. She fell on her sword and impaled them in the same blow. I’m sorry – this is just too funny. She and her husband have the art of politics down – Obama thought he was safe by putting her in a position of power. She showed him that he is a mere babe in the woods. But, this one isn’t over yet.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Rise of the Molecular Machines.

SOME POST PEACE-PRIZE RUMINATIONS: Switzerland May Have to Deploy Troops in Response to Euro Crisis.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Obama Breaking Point.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Jobless Numbers Just Don’t Add Up.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Pet Supplies.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Space Privatization, An Obama Success Story. So why doesn’t he want to do the same thing for education?

YOU PEOPLE ARE JUST TOO STUPID TO KNOW IT: Michelle Obama: “We are in the midst of a huge recovery.”

A NEW VIDEO: Look America In The Eye. By Tony Katz.

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WILL ROMNEY BE PREPARED FOR THE NEXT PONYTAIL GUY TOMORROW?

OH FRACK! Ben, I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics.

(Though I love the protestor wearing a Che T-shirt and flashing a peace sign. Perhaps he was simply expressing his opinion regarding the duality of man. You know, the Jungian thing, sir.)

GEORGE WILL: “Too Big To Fail” Banks Are Too Dangerous To Permit. I agree. Break ’em up. As Will says: “Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by TBTF, which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.”

DISAPPEARING STORYLINES: Now that Obama isn’t more “likeable” than Romney any more, likeability doesn’t matter! “The Romney image created by the Obama ad bombardment was unlikable, but the actual candidate turned out to be an astonishingly decent person and extremely capable. The clash between the cartoon Romney and the real Romney seems to have jolted the electorate. As for the media, the intellectual dishonesty should no longer surprise us, but it is disconcerting nevertheless. Romney’s unlikability is not only news but a media obsession. When he solves that issue, mum’s the word.”

Journalism!

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES BUILDS A COCOON, THEY BUILD IT TIGHT: Pat Caddell: NYT Engaging In Near-Complete Suppression of Libya Story To Shill For Loser President.

ILYA SOMIN ON Eric Hobsbawm And The Neglect of Communist Crimes. “I will add only that Hobsbawm’s career is yet another example of our neglect of communist crimes, demonstrated in this case by our willingness to excuse their apologists. Had Hobsbawm been a comparably dedicated and unrepentant apologist for the Nazis or even for a run of the mill right-wing authoritarian regime, he would not have been a respected member of the intellectual establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, and his books would not have been required reading for undergraduates all over the English-speaking world.”

I think the bottom line is that communists get better press because the press, and academia, contains a lot more communist sympathizers than it does Nazi sympathizers. That’s all.

TWO MAHERS IN ONE:

JAY LENO: Now, Roger Ailes said to Fox, they’re gonna scale back the rhetoric. You think this will last for any longer than a week or two?

MAHER: No, because that’s the rhetoric they love. The right-wing loves, the go-to rhetoric for them is, “Wouldn’t it be fun to kill the people we disagree with?”

— Newsbusters, January 12, 2001: “Bill Maher Heckled by ‘Tonight Show’ Crowd for Saying Conservatives Want to Kill People They Disagree With.”

Flash-forward an appearance by Maher on the October 7th edition of StarTalk Radio, a syndicated radio show hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson,who brought up the topic of the death penalty. Maher responded:

“I have a lot of ideas that you might consider conservative.  But I feel like on that, I’m just consistent, like the pope is consistent.  The pope is consistently pro-life; I’m consistently pro-death.

“I am for the death penalty, although I do believe in more DNA testing,” Maher continued.  “My motto is, ‘Let’s kill the right people.’  I’m pro-choice.  I’m for assisted suicide.  I’m for regular suicide.  I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving.  That’s what I’m for.”

“It’s too crowded,” Maher continued.  “So, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.”

Such hateful eliminationist rhetoric. I wonder if that’s the official opinion of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO, Maher’s employer?

THE FOURTEEN YEAR-OLD PAKISTANI GIRL who was shot by the Taliban for promoting Western culture is being flown to the United Kingdom for medical treatment. The British ought to let her spend the rest of her life there. The Taliban threatened to try to kill her again if she survives. She’d made a great immigrant to Great Britain. And if the British don’t want her, we ought to take her.

BACKING UP DATA . . . TO A GERBIL????:  Yep, that’s right.  Scientists have discovered a way to store data, any type of data, in DNA.  As Wired reporter Lore Sjöberg puts it:

The ability to store data in DNA molecules is an important breakthrough, not because of the reasons given, but because it allows you to back your data up to a gerbil. Who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t want to say, “I’ve got my presentation right here, in this gerbil”? Who doesn’t want to stride into a FedEx Office place and ask where they keep their gerbil readers?

There are other obvious advantages to gerbil-based data storage. To begin with, having multiple copies of your backed-up data is no problem — just stick another gerbil in there, and boom! Put the data on the Y chromosome and you can be sure that every male gerbil born is a fresh, probably unaltered copy of your data.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to have to clean up poop in order to store or retrieve data.  I’d rather have one of those cute little plastic flash drives that’s shaped like a gerbil.  Much cleaner.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoparticles deliver cargo inside mitochondria. “Targeted drug delivery is one of the most important contributions of current and near-term nanotechnology to medicine. New research shows that specifically targeting one component of the cell makes nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery much more effective for a variety of applications.”

DID OBAMA BAILOUT GM OR GM-CHINA? Autobailouttruth.org has a troubling new spot up that focuses on the fact GM’s own chairman says seven out of every 10 cars his company builds these days comes off a foreign assembly line. And GM plans to move more of its operations to China. The spot dovetails closely with the Truth About Cars report linked earlier today by Ed Driscoll.

NICK GILLESPIE: Would ObamaCare Have Saved Nick Kristof’s Friend Better Than The Existing Healthcare System? “So maybe if he’d been forced to buy insurance against his will, he would have also visited the doctor for annual physicals including prostate exams or at least blood screens for that sort of trouble. Maybe, though having insurance and using it for the sorts of regular care (such as blood screens for PSA levels) that would have caught this problem early on are very different matters. . . . The story Kristof tells is not a happy one, to be sure. If Androes had acted differently, his cancer might have been caught much sooner when it was more easily treated. Certainly, that would have cost less both in terms of heartache and anxiety and in terms of dollars and cents. But the fact is also that Androes is getting treatment—and in a way that is not bankrupting him. And if you have deadly cancer, you’re better off on average to be in the United States than anywhere else in the developed world; the five-year survival rates for most cancers are better here than in Canada, Europe, or Japan.”

I wasn’t deeply moved by the story of a guy who had a “midlife crisis” and chose not to buy health insurance because he preferred to spend the money on other things. It’s like choosing not to wear seat belt.

More: “What’s missing from Kristof’s piece—and from too much of the discussion about health care reform—is any sense of how the current employer-based system (which Obamacare does virtually nothing to change) came into being and how an actual market in the provision of health care (not even insurance per se) might improve the situation. Why do blood tests and basic checkups cost so much? It’s not because markets are allowed to work; indeed, it’s precisely because every aspect of the delivery system is wrapped up in more red tape than we can imagine or untangle. By adding more bureaucracy and oversight from afar, Obamacare will certainly increase many of the problems it set out to address. And there’s no reason to believe that the law—whose cost estimates are already climbing prior to full implementaiton—will make care cheaper or better.”

Nope. But it will empower bureaucrats and increase the opportunities for political graft. So: Mission accomplished!

MOUTH SHAPED URINALS:  A restaurant in Sydney, Australia removes urinals shaped like women’s mouths, after receiving complaints from feminist groups.  I would think they’d be counterproductive, to boot, as arousal and urination seem to be incompatible. But what do I know–I’m a girl.  :)

UPDATE: (From Glenn): If you click through, you’ll see that they were designed by a woman, for whatever that’s worth.

THAT ANNOYING CONSTITUTION:  Keeps getting in Obama’s way. But that hasn’t stopped him.  A great article in the Washington Free Beacon discusses all the ways in which the Obama Administration is evincing hostility toward, and disregard of, the Constitution’s Article II limitations on executive power.