NEWS YOU CAN USE: Popular bathroom wipes blamed for sewer clogs.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS, Department of Self-Parody.

WHAT PEOPLE WANT: The covers of most men’s and women’s magazines have similar headlines: “Get Great Abs” and “Have Amazing Sex.” So, basically, I’m livin’ the dream.

A HELPFUL PRODUCT: In my first house, light-bulb sockets were brass, which is self-lubricating. In my current house, somebody saved money by using sockets made of some hideous base metal with a high coefficient of friction. That’s left me with more broken bulbs to be extracted with the bulb-extractor tool than I’ve ever faced before. My solution has been this bulb and socket lube, a conductive lubricant that you smear on the bulb threads before installation. That seems to have solved the problem, and it’s cheap.

SO FAR, NOT SUCH A GREAT CENTURY FOR THE LEGAL PROFESSION: ABA Journal: Legal Services Companies Are Eating Law Firms’ Lunch.

FOR THREE MILLION DOLLARS, the ultimate land yacht? “The Palazzo features two floors of entertainment and extravagance, with a giant master suite, multiple bars and a liftable ‘flybridge’ lounge up top. If the weather isn’t conducive to rooftop cocktails, you can extend the driver’s side slide-out, increasing interior space by 80%. Marchi’s failure to incorporate a helipad is, to say the very least, disappointing.”

Don’t be silly. The helipad is on the limo.

YOU NEVER GO THE FULL GODWIN, MAN: Ed Driscoll: Chris Matthews Goes Full Godwin on Ted Cruz.

TEST-DRIVE: 2014 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk V-6 4×4.

MEET OBAMACARE’S WEDDING TAX: “Better off divorced and shacking up.”

REAL ESTATE: 6 Castles That Cost Less Than An Apartment In NYC. “Sadly, all of these are real.”

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Reader Andrew Smith recommends It Burns A Lovely Light, by Penny McAnn Pennington.

WELL, THAT’S ENCOURAGING: Hospital-Based Infections Could Be Moving to Doctor’s Offices. “When patients check into a hospital, they expect doctors there to fix what ails them, but one in 20 patients seeking care at hospitals contract a health care–based infection. Those infections escalate care costs to the tune of billions of dollars. And many of them–one in five–are part of the scary alphabet soup of superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics. The problem is not a new one, top health officials say, but as more patients receive minor surgeries and care at clinics and doctor’s offices instead of pricier hospital settings, that shift could fuel the growth of infections outside of hospitals.”

We need better antibiotics as soon as we can get ’em, and better sanitation now.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Rent An Exotic Sports Car.

WARREN FARRELL: Rigid Campus Feminism: Is It Forever?

COULD MOTION SICKNESS BE about posture and gait, and not the inner ear?

OVERREACH: IRS Relies on 1884 ‘Dead Horse’ Statute to Justify Takeover of Tax Return Preparer Industry.

INTERVIEW: The Man Who Gets The Science Right On ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ “Sure, Bob Newhart may have won his first Emmy for guest-starring as Professor Proton on the hugely popular show The Big Bang Theory, about four young scientists at Caltech. But behind the scenes is a real-life professor, David Saltzberg of UCLA. Saltzberg studies high-energy particle physics and high-energy neutrino astronomy, using radio-detection techniques when he’s not working as The Big Bang Theory’s science consultant.”

#WARONMEN: Forbes: Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women.

#WARONTENNESSEE: Tennessee: Obamacare will triple men’s premiums, double women’s.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Tea Party Leader: We’re Disgusted, Looking for Justice After Lois Lerner’s Retirement.

DYLAN BYERS IN POLITICO: Ted Cruz, Wendy Davis and media bias. “When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an ’embarrassment’ in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board. . . . Davis wasn’t viewed through a critical lens at all. Her willingness to stand for 11 hours was evidence of the American dream in action. Period.”

Once you understand that the trad-media are, in Scott Johnson’s words, “a Democratic protection racket,” it all makes sense.

COMING SOON FROM AMAZON: The new Kindle Fire HDX. This bit seems interesting: “Introducing the ‘Mayday’ button—revolutionary, on-device tech support. Connect for free to an Amazon expert 24×7, 365 days a year.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 139.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: NYC Charter Schools Plan Showdown With Future Mayor.

New York City has just become ground zero in the national debate over charter schools, with a massive protest scheduled for next month. On October 8th, a number of charter school teachers and their students will take the day off and head to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they will protest what they see as mayoral favorite Bill de Blasio’s attacks on charter schools.

Early in the campaign, de Blasio announced his intentions to begin charging them rent for the use of public school buildings. Most of the city’s charter schools currently operate out of empty or underused public school buildings, for which the city charges no rent.

Now battle lines are being drawn. Teachers unions and left-leaning outlets like the Daily News point out that this is a relatively unusual arrangement—many cities charge charter schools at least nominal rent for use of city property. They also express concern that the deal gives charters an “unfair advantage” over their public-school competition. Charter supporters object to the change, which they say could force many to shut down or cut back on programs that benefit their students. It’s a particularly potent concern in a city where rents are stratospherically expensive.

The public schools can’t take competition. But charter schools are the only way to keep dissatisfied parents in the public system at all. Kill them and they’ll take their kids elsewhere — and their support for public school funding, and the taxes to support it, too. In other words, everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Lacking new ideas, Obama takes to announcing what he’s not going to do.

Nile Gardiner: Barack Obama’s UN speech was pure mush. America’s enemies no longer fear the US superpower. More mush from the wimp?

Related: Even NYT admits Obama foreign policy not looking so good.

UPDATE: Public Turns Against Obama’s Confused Foreign Policy.

If there is one point that President Obama’s defenders have made in favor of his muddled Syria policy, it is its popularity. Not so fast. A new New York Times/CBS News poll finds “that 52 percent disapproved of the way Mr. Obama was handling the situation in Syria.”

Moreover, Americans aren’t happy with Obama’s foreign policy in general: “Forty-nine percent disapproved of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy efforts, up 10 points since early June, and 40 percent approved. The president’s negative rating on foreign policy has grown among Americans of all political stripes, with disapproval up 8 points among Democrats, 10 points among Republicans and 13 points among independents.”

With his mishandling of Syria, Obama appears to have thrown away, at least for now, the foreign-policy advantage he had wrested away from Republicans largely with the SEAL raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

I have previously written that presidents must not make foreign-policy decisions based on public opinion polls, so simply because the public thinks the Obama administration’s foreign policy is wrong doesn’t necessarily make it so. But in this case I think the public is onto something. What the public perceives–the same thing that much of the world perceives–is that Obama is weak and vacillating, deliberative but indecisive.

It’s hard to stand up for America when you don’t really believe in America.