NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Last Year President Obama Reportedly Told His Aides That He’s ‘Really Good At Killing People.’

‘CAUSE INFORMATION’S GOT YOUR NUMBER, TOO: No Morsel Too Minuscule For All-Consuming NSA.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Putin’s Big Nuclear War Drill.

It’s a sign of just how fast the balance of world power is shifting, that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin oversaw a huge exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces this Wednesday, involving — as the AP reported – “multiple test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a formidable demonstration of Russia’s resurgent military power.” This follows the entry of Russian warships into the Mediterranean, concurrent with the Russia-brokered deal to relieve Syria’s Assad regime of its chemical weapons, at the cost of relieving the U.S. of any real influence in what might come next. That followed the biggest war games launched by the Russian military in more than two decades, involving, as the AP also reported, “160,000 troops, about 5,000 tanks, more than 100 aircraft and dozens of navy ships.”

Well, yeah, but Putin’s still afraid of a few girls.

THEY’RE NOT SO BIG ON PRIVACY: ‘How did they know?’ Jim Angle shares disturbing experience with Obamacare 800 number.

HEH: Advance Copy of Obama’s Speech for Terry McAuliffe Leaked to Cuccinelli Campaign.

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IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Lois Lerner and Really Cushy Deals.

TWEET OF THE DAY: You can’t blame “politics” for the Obamacare website disaster when you lied to get it passed and then again during the entire 2012 campaign.

WAPO: How Political Calculation Won Out Over Technical Considerations with HealthCare.gov. “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.”

SULTAN KNISH: Government Is Magic:

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

A government that can’t build a health care website isn’t likely to be very good at running health care for 330 million people. But the technocrats aren’t so concerned with being good as with being in charge.

ARITHMETIC WINS EVERY TIME: Charlie Martin: ObamaCare vs. Arithmetic.

NEW SPIN: Yeah, Obama Lied, But He Had To Because You’re Stupid. That should sell.

LARRY KUDLOW: Liberal entitlement-state dream is crumbling.

As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra. I don’t want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibles, and with services I don’t need or want?

Why? Because Team Obama says I have to. And that’s not much of a reason. It’s not freedom.

Fortunately, NBC News pulled the plug this past week on President Barack Obama’s promise that “if you like your own plan, you can keep it.” Ditto for keeping your own doctor. The plug was pulled because NBC learned that Team Obama knew—for three years—that stiff new regulations would prevent the grandfathering of existing health-care plans. And not just a few plans. But plans that could affect as many as 15 million individuals.

The day after that bombshell hit, the president tried to blame insurers rather than regulatory overkill for this Obamacare shortfall. Yet both the public and the mainstream media were having none of it. In what may turn out to be a landmark moment, Americans and the media at large have turned against the president and Obamacare.

There does seem to be a shift.

KELSEY OSTERMAN: The gun grab: How ‘zero tolerance’ school policies ignore common sense. “According to the National Association of School Psychologists, 94 percent of schools have zero tolerance policies for firearms, compared to 91 percent for other weapons and 88 percent for drugs. The NASP also concluded that zero tolerance policies can be incredibly harmful to children in the long run and are usually ineffective as a means of discipline.”

THE NEW “SOCCER MOM” VOTING BLOC: People who have been screwed by ObamaCare. GOP ought to be able to figure out who they are, mail to them and do social-media contacts. If it’s smart enough to do that. . . .

THE MORE YOU RACE ‘EM, THE LESS YOU TRUST — THE LESS YOU DRIVE ‘EM THE MORE THEY RUST. Two dreams make the world go round: The one you’ve lost and the one you claim you’ve found.

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THIS DOESN’T SOUND GOOD: Imprisoned Pussy Riot Member Goes Missing In Jail. “The punk-turned-inmate has effectively vanished.”

FLASHBACK: Remembering Obama’s 2008 Promise Of “Net Spending Cuts.”

That was then. This is now: Obama dislikes GOP spending cut ‘obsession.’

DON’T MAUNDER ON TRYING TO MINIMIZE THIS: Solar activity heads for lowest low in four centuries. “Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent.” But, he says, human warming will prevent a Little Ice Age.

Er, Fallen Angels was science fiction, right guys? Right?

KLAVAN ON THE CULTURE: Barack Obama’s Narrative Illusions.

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MARK STEYN: A Phalanx of Lies: Remember that health insurance you could keep?

Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States: For the media, just a spoonful of bovine manure makes the Obamacare medicine go down. It remains to be seen whether the American citizenry will be so genially indulgent. Hitherto, most of what the president claims to be unaware of, they are genuinely unaware of: Few people have plans to vacation in Benghazi, or shoot the breeze with Angela Merkel on her cell phone. But Obamacare is different: Whether or not the president is unaware of it, the more than 2 million Americans (at the time of writing) kicked off their current health-care plans are most certainly aware of it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

Indeed.

TYLER COWEN reviews Virginia Postrel’s The Power Of Glamour. “I believe this is her best and most compelling book. It is wonderfully researched, very well written, the topic is understudied yet of universal import, and the accompanying visuals are striking.”