LIONFISH UPDATE: An Unabated Siege Of The Atlantic.

Well, I’m doing my part.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Mark Alger, The High T Shebang.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Why New Drugs Are So Expensive. “Drug companies insist that they need to make billions of dollars on their medicines because their failure rate is so high and because they need to convince investors it is wise to sink money into research. That’s true, but it’s also true that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, buys more than 50 percent of its prescription drugs. And it buys them at prices designed to subsidize the rest of the industrial world, where the same drugs cost much less, although most poor governments can’t afford them at even those lower prices.”

Yes, other countries’ health systems are free-riding off of a U.S. subsidy.

CANCER SURVIVOR loses coverage, doctor due to ObamaCare.

DISASTER PREP: One Year After Superstorm Sandy, Has Anything Changed?

SHELL GAME: Too Big To Manage: Feds invoke ‘privacy’ to shield public employees while snooping on the rest of us.

FREE SPEECH: We Stand With Ezra. Ezra Levant has done a lot to explode Canada’s culture of PC soft censorship. Naturally, he’s a target.

WAR ON WOMEN: CBS Video: Obamacare Takes Away Woman’s Health Care Choices.

POLITICS AND UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE: Bill Whittle on the media environment and what to do.

CIVIL WAR: Politico: The Democrats’ United Front Cracks.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 169.

RANKS OF TERRORISTS, ARSONISTS, AND SEDITIONISTS EXPANDING DAILY: 10 Senate Democrats Call For ObamaCare Mandate Delay.

TOM BLUMER: Now we see how weak the pre-shutdown economy was. And it’s getting weaker.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The ObamaCare Fiasco Isn’t A Single-Payer Conspiracy.

Here’s why: Most Americans have insurance, and most Americans like that insurance. That’s why the administration designed such a complicated, kludgy system; they had to at least be able to claim that all the people who had insurance they liked would be able to keep it. Obviously, this wasn’t quite true — folks who buy in the individual market often experience big price hikes, and some folks with employer-provided insurance are eventually going to see it altered or dropped. But it leaves the employer-sponsored health-care system relatively intact, compared to just taking over the insurance market.

Oh, there were other reasons, too: Trying to get rid of the insurance market would have obviously triggered a giant war with the insurers and other providers. But that is not what made single-payer fundamentally impossible, so clearly unworkable that the administration didn’t even seriously consider it. What made single payer impossible is the fact that tens of millions of voters have employer-sponsored insurance that they basically like, and they would freak out if you told them it was being replaced by a government-run national health-care program. Progressives could spend all the time they wanted talking about how awesome things are in Canada, but it wouldn’t have altered the fundamental political calculus. People are loss-averse; they worry more about losing what they have than they do about some unproven potential gain.

If Obamacare’s insurance reforms break the market, that calculus still won’t change: Most people will still have insurance they like, and they will not be willing to give it up in order to solve problems in the individual market — which now covers about 5 percent of the population and is expected to ultimately cover something over that. Even if the individual market functionally disappears, most people will still be covered, and most politicians will be unwilling to endorse a program that takes away what they have. There is no path to single payer from even a spectacular Obamacare implosion — for the same reason that there was no path to single payer before Obamacare was passed.

Well, that’s a relief.

ROGER SIMON: Alinsky Lessons For Republicans. Good advice.

WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH . . . .Obama Flees ObamaCare Disaster For New York Fundraiser. “The president will fly to his two New York fundraisers on Air Force One gratis because he’s also got a quick non-partisan stop at a local high school.” Well, that was certainly convenient.

DEBTORS’ PRISON: The euro zone is blighted by private debt even more than by government debt.

FROM AMAZON, The 2013 Swarovski Crystal Star Ornament Is Here.

Also, Men’s Fall Shoes. And Women’s Fall Shoes.

Plus, today only: “Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection.” On Blu-Ray, 57% off.

INSTAVISION: I talk with Paleoista writer Nell Stephenson about paleo dieting and exercise.

YA THINK? Builders of Obamacare website say more testing was needed.

The contractors, CGI Federal and Quality Software Services, said the two weeks of testing done in late September wasn’t enough to ensure the many components from different contractors operating smoothly in unison before the entire system went online Oct. 1.

“We would’ve loved to have months to be able to do that,” CGI Federal Senior Vice President Cheryl Campbell said Thursday during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing to investigate why the healthcare.gov website hasn’t worked as planned.

Andrew Slavitt, an executive with Quality Software Services’ parent company, said “ideally, integrated testing would’ve occurred well before” it did.
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He said while it was difficult to estimate exactly how much testing time was needed, “months would’ve been nice.”

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, not a specialized technical company, conducted the tests.

Maybe years?

HARRY REID: There’s Not Going To Be A Grand Bargain.

THE HILL: Business leaders meet with White House officials on immigration. “The meeting with business and association leaders, including the Chamber of Commerce, comes hours after President Obama spoke on the hot-button issue at the White House. Attendees include Aric Newhouse, the senior vice president for policy and government relations at the National Association of Manufacturers and Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the Chamber of Commerce.”

SEE, THIS DOESN’T BOTHER ME MUCH: NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts. Here’s why:

(1) It’s their freakin’ job to spy on other countries. That’s why they’re an intelligence agency. Sure, everyone’s putting on their shocked face now, but in fact those countries have their own spying programs, and many of them, despite what they’re saying now, are deeply involved in cooperating with the United States intelligence-gathering operation.

(2) Unlike spying on American citizens — where the risks of political abuse are genuine — spying on foreigners poses relatively little domestic political threat. The danger of domestic spying is that a President will be strongly tempted to use those powers not for national security reasons, but for purposes of blackmail and political strategy. Those dangers are largely absent when you’re spying on Angela Merkel.

The big embarrassment here isn’t the spying, but rather the fact that it has become public due to the incompetence of those charged with keeping it secret — and, of course, the inept response once the news has come out.

ACTUALLY, THE BIG DISGRACE IS THAT THERE ARE “EPA AGENTS” TO BEGIN WITH: Exclusive–Mission Creep: EPA Agents Enter Drug War.

I have obtained exclusive video of one of these agents in action.