ANTI-BULLYING CAMPAIGN IN PROCESS OF TURNING INTO BULLYING CAMPAIGN: Walter Olson: Get ready for the government to determine what bullying online is (and therefore, what free speech isn’t).

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Plus, $50 off on Kindle DX.

EVERYONE MUST PAY: Mailing Out Bills To Collect A Ten Cent Toll.

If you’ve been traveling the Sakonnet River Bridge regularly without an E-ZPass account, or if you’ve crossed it without your transponder in place, you can expect to get a bill in the mail soon.

The Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority this week enacted a policy to collect the 10-cent toll from drivers without a transponder mounted in their car. The toll went into effect Aug. 19.

Those with E-ZPass transponders had the toll automatically deducted from their accounts. The overhead gantry at the Portsmouth end of the bridge has photographed the license plates of the cars crossing without a transponder, but because of the low toll, the authority has not billed those drivers.

That is going to change.

The authority is set to review the 750,000 license plate images collected since Aug. 19, and will be mailing bills to any driver who has crossed the bridge at least 25 times, Chairman David A. Darlington said. He expects about half those drivers have an E-ZPass account, he said, and the toll will be deducted from that account.

This will go smoothly, I’m sure.

SPYING: Don’t Snoop Me, Bro: “It’s a VPN in a box. You hook it up to your network and turn the key (literally, it has a physical key) and it turns on a VPN tunnel via a VPN service routing your data through another country.”

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Americans’ Satisfaction With Health Coverage Slips.

OIL: Senate clears bill to implement drilling pact. “The bill to implement the 2012 U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement quickly cleared the Senate by ‘unanimous consent,’ avoiding a roll call vote. The drilling pact – which backers say would provide legal certainty needed to enable development along the Gulf boundary – has bipartisan support. But the Senate legislation differs from a House-approved version of the implementing bill.”

WHEN IT’S JUST NOT YOUR DAY: New York man hit by exploding toilet. “A New York man was seriously injured when a toilet exploded in his face after he pulled the handle to test the water pressure in his Brooklyn apartment.” So, I guess there was plenty.

SALENA ZITO: No Evidence Dems Can Take Back House.

It is a possibility pushed by paid pundits as reality, but the facts do not support it.

That does not mean a wave election isn’t brewing out on Main Street. In fact, early polling indicates the 2014 midterm might produce another electoral shift, but not one that shoves Republicans out of power.

First of all, the playing field of vulnerable GOP seats is too narrow for Republicans to lose their majority, baring a massive wave. (Think 1894, when 107 Democrats were swept out of the House.)

Second, major waves historically have not happened concurrent with the “six-year itch” – the election held in the sixth year of a president’s tenure, in which the party holding the White House typically loses a substantial number of House and Senate seats.

And remember that, in the 1996 midterm election of the Clinton era, Republicans lost 18 incumbents but kicked the Democrats’ butts in the open-seat races. The Republicans’ losses were mostly “wave seats” that they unexpectedly won two years earlier, during their first sweep back into power after 40 years in the political wilderness.

Coincidentally, all of that occurred in the year of another government shutdown – that one over the funding of Medicare, which is a heck of a lot more popular with voters than Obamacare.

Today, every member of Congress, along with the White House and President Obama, are getting battered in the polls over how they’ve handled the shutdown, with Republicans taking a slim lead on the voter-anger index.

Kyle Kondik, a House analyst for the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, says that if (and he stresses a big “if”) Republicans eventually suffer because of the shutdown, it will not be Tea Partiers who are hurt.

“While the Republican brand is poor, the president isn’t particularly popular – his approval is only in the low to mid 40s, according to polling averages,” said Kondik. “There would have to be an incredible amount of revulsion with the Republicans to deliver the House to the Democrats.”

Plus, historically, there’s basically no precedent for the president’s party to capture control of the House in a midterm year. Many presidents have held the House in a midterm, but they haven’t taken control of it in a midterm.

Mostly this is Dem pundits playing on GOP fears. It’s working, too.

THE HOUSING AND FINANCIAL MELTDOWNS REVISITED: “Five years after the housing and financial meltdown, self-styled progressives are still peddling the Glass-Steagall pseudoexplanation.”