CAUGHT IN A CONTRADICTION: Obamacare Bureaucracy’s Definition of ‘Enroll’ Not the Same as the White House’s Definition of ‘Enroll.’ “So according to CMS, a person is not enrolled until they have paid. The health insurance industry also does not count someone as enrolled until they pay. The Obama White House, though, will report people who have dropped a healthcare plan into their exchange shopping cart, but not paid, as also enrolled.”

Related: Obama’s Problem Governing Isn’t That He’s An Introvert, It’s That He Hasn’t Been Telling The Truth.

UPDATE: Oregon Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader: ‘I Think the President Was Grossly Misleading to the American Public.’ Video at the link.

CBS NEWS: Memo warned of “limitless” security risks for HealthCare.gov.

UPDATE: 10 Reasons For The White House To Panic. “It is time to call in a savior chief of staff in the mold of Howard Baker or look at some serious policy changes.” Who could save Obama in that capacity? Bill Clinton, maybe. But I doubt he’d take the job, and I really doubt Obama would offer it, since it would be an ignominious admission of incompetence.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 187.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Private Colleges Face Plummeting Enrollment.

From 2010 through 2012, freshman enrollment at more than a quarter of U.S. private four-year schools declined 10% or more, according to federal data The Wall Street Journal analyzed. From 2006 through 2009, fewer than one in five experienced a similar decline.

The trajectory reflects demographic and technological changes, along with questions about a college degree’s value that are challenging centuries-old business models. The impact is uneven: Some wealthy, selective private colleges are flourishing, while many others suffer.

Schools on the losing end are responding with closures, layoffs, cutbacks, mergers and new recruitment strategies. Many see these as the first signs of a shakeout that will reorder the industry.

“I think it’s fair to say 30% of these private schools won’t exist in a decade,” said Jonathan Henry, vice president for enrollment at Husson University, a private school in Bangor, Maine, whose 2013 first-year enrollment was 17% lower than in 2009. “A lot of these schools will have to learn to live with less.” Husson has built graduate programs to offset the declines, he said.

Crap, by the time my new book comes out in January, everything I predict will have happened! Okay, not really, but wow this is unfolding fast.

THE ATLANTIC HARSHES THE NARRATIVE: The Republican Party Isn’t Really the Anti-Science Party: Conservative conflict with science on evolution and global warming has been exaggerated—while liberals get a free pass for their own failings.

You knew this was coming: Chris Mooney, call your office.

IT’S NOT JUST FOR CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ANYMORE: What I Saw At The Doomsday Prepper Convention.

Hey, even Amazon has an Emergency Essentials Store for preppers.

AT AMAZON, 50% off Koss ProDJ100 Headphones.

Also, pre-Black Friday deals in Sports & Outdoors.

Plus, take an extra 15% off SOG knives and tools.

And, today only: Up to 65% Off “Friends: The Complete Series.” On Blu-Ray or DVD.

Also today only: Up to 60% Off Pajamas for Women, Men, and Kids. Stay snuggly-warm this winter.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN is about Avik Roy’s new book, How Medicaid Fails The Poor.

BRITAIN: Reporters put up posters of wanted terrorist, are arrested for inciting racism.

CHICAGO’S TRIPLE-DOWNGRADE: A foretaste of De Blasio’s New York?

MAYBE THE JESUITS AT GONZAGA SHOULD FAMILIARIZE THEMSELVES WITH THAT AQUINAS GUY: College Will Review Gun Policy After Students Defend Themselves.

THE HILL: How Immigration Reform Died — Part I.

BILL WHITTLE: Thoughts On The Common Sense Resistance.

JOHN FUND: The Truth About ObamaCare Navigators: James O’Keefe reveals corruption at the heart of the president’s signature program. Video at the link. “The events of O’Keefe’s video of a Texas navigator site run by the National Urban League are a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud. Government-paid workers supposedly trained to uphold the law advise clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.”

JAMES TARANTO: The Pettiest Victim: The New York Times’s idea of an ObamaCare horror story.

At first we were pleasantly surprised that the Times, whose editorial page has been unwavering in its pro-ObamaCare propagandizing, was giving space to an opposing point of view, but after reading the piece, we suspect it’s a put-on. . . .

We were taken with the irony of Gottlieb’s liberal friends, surely committed feminists to a man, advising her to seek escape from ObamaCare’s shackles in the bonds of matrimony. We tweeted to that effect–whereupon fellow Twitter denizen David Pinsen made a connection we’d missed.

It seems the same Lori Gottlieb was the author of a long article that appeared in The Atlantic’s March 2008 issue titled “Marry Him!” and subtitled “The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough.” In 2010 she expanded it into a book, with the same title, sans exclamation point. (Its publication prompted an amusing blog post from someone using the moniker “The Last Psychiatrist.”)

So the woman who encouraged women to settle now won’t even marry Mr. Good Enough With Benefits. Are we to believe another perverse consequence of ObamaCare is that it’s inducing single women to become even pickier?

To be sure, Gottlieb’s story does illustrate the fraudulence of ObamaCare. A law that is supposed to reduce medical costs is increasing hers considerably. Contrary to President Obama’s promise, she doesn’t get to keep her doctor, which means she doesn’t get to keep her plan either, in any meaningful sense.

And contrary to the latest equivocation of the ObamaCare claim–which the Times advances right over on the editorial page–her new plan isn’t “better” and includes worthless (to her) provisions like maternity coverage. But the way she frames her complaints is so off-putting, you have to wonder if the Times intended the article’s publication as a joke at ObamaCare critics’ expense.

I doubt the Times editors are possessed of that much subtlety.

BLOGGING A TRAIN WRECK: Now out: A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case, coauthored by Randy Barnett, Ilya Somin, Jonathan Adler, David Bernstein, Dave Kopel, et al.

CHANGE: ‘Up in the Air’ author Walter Kirn: ‘I withdraw my support’ for Obamacare.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Video Exposes ObamaCare Navigator Fraud.

2009-2016: NOTHING GAINED, MUCH LOST. Victor Davis Hanson: America’s Wilderness Years.

PETER SUDERMAN: Time to Start Considering Obamacare’s Worst Case Scenarios.

The saying goes that things have to get worse before they get better. But with Obamacare, things just keep getting worse—and then they get worse still. In private, even many critics of the law are at least a bit surprised by how poorly the rollout has gone. The question that many are asking is: How bad can this really get?

The answer is…worse. A lot worse.

Over the weekend, several reports suggested that, despite continued assurances that Healthcare.gov, the problem-plagued online insurance enrollment portal run by the federal government, would be running smoothly for most users by the end of the month, it increasingly looks likely that the deadline will be missed. . . .

It’s a problem that would be big enough on its own, but is now compounded by the fact that, thanks to rules and regulations built into the law, millions of Americans have already had their existing individual-market insurance cancelled, and estimates say that millions more cancellations are on the way. The end result could be that many people—thousands, perhaps even millions—end up with their current private insurance plans terminated due to the law, but no way to sign up for new coverage.

This is not a problem confined to the 36 states covered by the federally run health exchanges. In the state of Oregon, which has struggled to get its online enrollment system working and has yet to enroll a single person in private coverage, some 150,000 people are losing their existing health plans.

Remember how ObamaCare defenders accused opponents of being heartless killers who didn’t care about the uninsured? Stopping ObamaCare would have done more to prevent people from being uninsured than anything else we could have done — including, probably, making ObamaCare work as advertised, which is looking increasingly implausible.

It’s layer after layer of disaster — like peeling an onion of fail! — and why? Because: “They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.”

21ST CENTURY LAWYERING: Estate Planning For Sex Toys. You think it’s dicey now, just wait until the sexbots appear.

MICKEY KAUS: Panic Is An Option!

Too Big To Fail, Because We Might Need Their Help: The Obama administration has pioneered a new path to corporatism**: Screw up a government initiative so much you have to call in the big boys from the industry to fix it. … You think the White House owes the large insurers now that they’ve dispatched their experts to save healthcare.gov? It’s easy to think of dozens of situations in the next three years–assuming Obamacare survives–where Obama’s regulators will have to choose between more competition and cozier big-firm oligopolies. The first benefits consumers. The second benefits insurance company profits. They now have a big reason to favor approach #2.

It’s cronyism all the way down.

BECAUSE IT’S ESSENTIAL TO THE NARRATIVE: Why Is The Tea Party ‘Extremist,’ But Democratic Support For Big Government ‘Moderate’?

HOW BAD IS IT? Hope Is All Obamacare Has Left.

It is possible to imagine contingency plans that the administration could have put into place before Oct. 1. At the very least, it could have been much more generous in allowing people to stay on grandfathered policies. And it could have had the government printing office print up booklets and mail them to every household, giving all the exchange policy options in your county, numbers to call for the insurers, and tables with the possible subsidies. This would still have been a problem, because the exchanges are supposed to attract the young, healthy consumers who are needed to keep insurance premiums affordable for everyone.

You can even imagine the administration having done things like this in, say, the second week of October. But you can’t imagine this being done now. It is one month until the deadline to buy insurance for January. Even if the administration started this morning, none of these things would work. There just isn’t enough time.

When the tech geeks raised concerns about their ability to deliver the website on time, they are reported to have been told “Failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, this is what happens when you say “failure is not an option”: You don’t develop backup plans, which means that your failure may turn into a disaster.

Yep.

CHARLOTTE ALLEN: Men paying for Third World sex: “nasty”; women paying for Third World sex: “romantic.”