THROWING AWAY 300 YEARS OF FREEDOM: New Regulations Threaten Freedom of the Press in UK. I don’t for a minute believe that this regime would be “unthinkable” to American politicians. I think they’d love to see it.

TRYING TO APPLY FOR OBAMACARE BY PHONE, OR WITH PEN AND PAPER? Good Luck With That. “With the supposedly state-of-the-art $600 million HealthCare.gov portal malfunctioning, President Barack Obama is urging Americans to go ahead and try to get health coverage by mailing in a paper application, calling the helpline or seeking help from one of the trained ‘assisters.’ But the truth is those applications — on paper or by phone — have to get entered into the same lousy website that is causing the problems in the first place. And the people processing the paper and calls don’t have any cyber secret passage to duck around that.”

UPDATE: It’s come to this: Video: ObamaCare meltdown raises serious questions about being unmanageable, says … David Gregory. Plus: “The incompetence turns into dishonesty and opacity, which frustrates ACA supporter Josh Barro at Business Insider. Barro participated in a CMS conference call yesterday, and came away with more questions and worry than when he started.”

JAMES TARANTO: Delaying From Behind: Bowing to the inevitable, Democrats think the unthinkable.

Our younger readers–those who were born yesterday–may not remember when delaying ObamaCare was considered a wild idea, its exponents limited to crazy right-wing terrorists. Times have certainly changed since–oh, the beginning of this week. “Democrats facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2014–Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska–came out on Wednesday evening in support of extending the open enrollment period of the law, as first proposed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is also up for reelection in 2014,” Politico reports. All these senators were elected or re-elected in 2008, when Barack Obama topped the ticket.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia isn’t up for re-election until 2018, but he is proposing a bill “to delay for a year the individual mandate’s enforcement mechanism–a $95 fine for anyone who doesn’t enroll in health insurance by March 31.” (That’s an incomplete description, for reasons we’ll get to below.)

The Obama administration itself “confirmed to The Washington Post a little bit ago that it is indeed tweaking the way the individual mandate works,” writes Sarah Kliff of the Post’s Wonkblog. This change amounts to a six-week delay: People who’ve enrolled in a health-insurance plan by March 31 won’t be subject to the mandate tax. The previous requirement was that one had to be covered by March 31, which as a practical matter meant the deadline for enrollment was Feb. 15.

“It’s not quite right to describe this as a delay of the individual mandate, or an extension of open enrollment,” Kliff writes. She’s correct on the latter point–enrollment still ends March 31–but mistaken on the former. Because of Chief Justice John Roberts’s convoluted construction of the law, the “mandate” is nothing more than the tax on noncompliance–a tax that will now be imposed six weeks later than had been the administration’s intent.

A six-week delay, or even a year’s delay, isn’t much. But it is something, which makes it a significant change from the Democrats’ previous position, which was to insist that no concessions were acceptable. Of course it’s easier to hold out when the party demanding concessions is a political adversary as opposed to reality itself.

But it’s also easy to lose sight of reality when focused on political adversity. A quote in today’s New York Times illustrates that point beautifully. It seems that in the days immediately before HealthCare.gov’s disastrous launch, “top White House officials were excitedly briefing lawmakers, reporters, Capitol Hill staff members and Washington pundits” about the “shiny new Web site that was elegantly designed, simple to use and ready.”

It’s Potemkin villages all the way down.

ACADEMY MEMBER ROGER SIMON on voting for the Oscars.

BUT I’M SURE ACORN OR THINKPROGRESS WOULD BE FINE: Fort Hood soldiers say Army warned them off tea party, Christian groups.

Don’t donate to the tea party or to evangelical Christian groups — that was the message soldiers at a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood said they received from a counter-intelligence agent who headed up the meeting.

If you do, you could face punishment — that was the other half of the message, as reported by Fox News. The briefing was Oct. 17, and about a half-hour of it was devoted to discussion about how perceived radical groups — like tea party organizations and the Christian-based American Family Association — were “tearing the country apart,” one unnamed soldier said, to Fox News.

Among the remarks the agent allegedly made: Military members who donate to these groups would be subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the soldier reported.

Liberty Institute has stepped in to investigate. Michael Berry, one of the nonprofit’s attorneys, said he has been advising the soldier about his options — but that in the meanwhile, he said the American public should be on guard.

They’re politicizing the military, like they’ve politicized the IRS, because they politicize everything. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

TRACY QUAN reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website. With no-bid contract.

CBS NEWS: Healthcare.gov’s Emergency Triage Plan.

It all sounded pretty good the day healthcare.gov went online: President Obama said people were flocking to the site. And any “glitches,” as he called them, would be fixed and they’d have the site running more quickly in just a few hours.

On Friday — 24 days later — the man the president brought in to rescue his health insurance program acknowledged the painfully obvious: that the problems have been far worse than we were told. Jeffrey Zeints said they’ll take weeks — if not longer — to fix. Plus, he’s shaking up the team overseeing the repairs. . . .

Zients says there are two categories of issues with the web site: performance, which is speed, response time and reliability; and function, the bugs that prevent the software from working properly.

The government also announced it’s removing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as overseers of repairs. That job is going to QSSI, one of the tech companies that helped build healthcare.gov.

“And by the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” said Zients.

That end of November date could be make or break for affordable care, according to one former Obamacare official who didn’t want to be identified. He said the government has weeks — not months — to fix the Web site before the entire business model gets thrown off.

Indeed.

MARGARET CARLSON ON THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE:

The rollout of Obamacare had to be absolutely perfect. Obama needed to treat it like a 21st-century Manhattan Project, full of 20-something geeks pulling all-nighters and managed by geniuses from Apple Inc. and Google Inc. who can fill in that blind spot between the techies and end users. Instead, he took the pedestrian route and spent $400 million on a Canadian company that our Good Neighbors to the North once fired for incompetence.

That brings us to those determined to stop Obamacare and, by extension, Obama himself (that’s why they call it Obamacare). They’re happy to watch the president making excuses. They’re gloating now, just a few days after the president did his own gloating over Republican incompetence during the government shutdown.

The website failure gives credence to those who warn that government can’t be trusted to get big things right, and that the market, not bureaucrats, should fix health care. It’s not just the crazies who doubt government now. According to the Pew Research Center, the competence of officialdom is on shaky ground, with only 19 percent of Americans saying they trust in government “just about always” or “most of the time.”

It’s worse than that. The GOP was mocked for its failure at political maneuvering. Obama is being mocked for his failure at executing his job.

TOMORROW: A big, transpartisan rally against mass surveillance in Washington, D.C.

OUCH: ‘Nobody Believes You’: AP Reporter Stuns State Department Spokeswoman. Some fairly dramatic video at the link.

52 THINGS, 52 WEEKS: Sara Ellis Tries Hang Gliding.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Washington Times Launching Legal Action After Armed Agents Seize Reporter’s Records, Notes.

Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.

The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.

The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files.

The Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.

It’ll be interesting to see how other media organizations respond to this rather Putinesque episode.

MEGAN FOX: Librarian Logic: I Hate Censorship So I Censored You on Facebook.

LEFT HAND, RIGHT HAND, YADDA YADDA: “At the same time the state is promoting food trucks, other governmental units are working to limit them.”

AT AMAZON, the Veteran’s Day Sale is underway.

Also, buy a CD or vinyl record, get the MP3 version for free.

Plus, bestsellers in Computer Security Software.

ANN ALTHOUSE engages in crude stereotyping.

SLOW-COOKER TIME: It’s “Crocktober!”

Here’s my recipe for Lamb & Guinness Stew. And here’s the old reliable Insta-Chicken recipe. And a lot of people liked the slow cooker salsa chicken recipe I posted a while back.

SPACE HISTORY: A 1960s Era Study Looks at the Politics of a 1980s Manned Mars Mission.

PROFESSOR SUSPENDED FOR TWEET ABOUT KILLING NRA SUPPORTERS’ KIDS won’t be returning to the classroom this year. It wasn’t a true threat, just a schmucky comment. On the other hand, if someone had said the same thing about Barack Obama’s kids, he’d be out of a job, not just shuffled off to unpleasant administrative duties.

UPDATE: A source tells me he was already scheduled for sabbatical in the Spring, which means less is happening here than might appear.

SPACE: Astronauts point to next frontier: Stopping killer asteroids.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Household Supplies.

Also, Warehouse Deals on Kitchen & Cookware.

Plus, deals on bestselling Blu-Ray players.

A TRICK OR TREAT FROM creepy Uncle Sam.

CHICAGO WAY: Feds confiscate investigative reporter’s confidential files during raid. “A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. . . . After the search began, Hudson said she was asked by an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written a series of critical stories about air marshals for The Washington Times over the last decade. The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security.”

More here. (Bumped).

A REVIEW OF EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN’S The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search For Answers to the Mystery of the Century.