HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 1L Enrollment Data at 20 California Law Schools.

GOING OFFROAD WITH THE 2014 Nissan Xterra Pro4X. “Awfully good off road.”

A SUCCESSFUL PREGNANCY using grafted ovaries. “A previously infertile woman has given birth to a healthy baby after undergoing a procedure that involved removing her ovaries and stimulating them in the lab to produce eggs. . . . Physicians removed study participants’ ovaries, cut them into small pieces and treated them with growth-stimulating drugs. After two days, some pieces were then ‘grafted’ back into the women’s Fallopian tubes, and monitored for follicle growth. In some participants, mature eggs were retrieved, and these underwent the standard process of in vitro fertilization.”

READER BOOK PLUG: Weight of an Empire, by Eric Forschler.

REVIEW: The Ford Fusion Energi plug-in hybrid.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Small Reactors May Be Nuclear Power’s Future.

SHUTDOWN THEATER BACKFIRE: Exclusive: Judicial Watch Files FOIA for Information Related to Closing of WWII Memorial.

STEPHEN GREEN: Tom Clancy, RIP.

THOMAS HENRIKSEN: The Perilous Future of Afghanistan. “As U.S. forces prepare to withdraw, will the country suffer a similar dismal fate as South Vietnam?”

STANDING UP TO OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT: You’ll love the ‘trophy’ World War II vets took home from the government shutdown blockade.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 146. If you have a chance, drop by the comments over at TaxProf and give TaxProf Paul Caron a thank-you. I’m sure that when he started these, he didn’t think he’d still be doing it every day almost 5 months later.

DOES THE GAS TAX HAVE A FUTURE?

Because the tax has no mechanism to account for inflation, revenues are falling below the increasing costs of road maintenance. The CBO projects that next year Congress will need to allocate $13 billion from the general treasury in order to keep the highway trust fund afloat. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a non-partisan organization, the trust fund would be fully funded had the 1993 tax been indexed to inflation.

There’s another problem for the gas tax going forward: it can’t account for the advent of hybrids, electric cars, and ever-increasing gas mileage. Drivers of high-mileage cars are freeloading on the gas-guzzlers, enjoying the luxury of well-maintained roads without paying their share of the costs.

Richard A. Stafford, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Traffic 21 initiative, tells VM, “The march of alternative ways to power vehicles (natural gas, natural gas liquids, electric) make any oil-based tax antiquated whether it’s on wholesale or retail and whether it’s indexed with inflation or not.” If that’s the case, we might want to replace the gas tax altogether with some kind of fee based on miles traveled – though we can see how implementing such a policy could get hairy.

Also, I thought we wanted to encourage alternative fuel technologies. Or is that only when we can funnel money into crony-capitalist operations like GreenTech?

A LIST OF House Democrats Who Voted Against Veterans Yesterday.

DEREK THOMPSON: How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse. “The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.”

AT AMAZON, deals on Art Supplies.

Also Knitting Supplies.

And, today only: 50% Off Men’s and Women’s Lucky Brand Denim.

TWO WEEKS FROM THE SPECIAL SENATE ELECTION IN NEW JERSEY, Republican candidate Steve Lonegan is outperforming expectations. The polls are closing up and Cory Booker is acting worried, switching from ignoring Lonegan to attacking him.

I saw Lonegan speak in New York last summer and was impressed.

UPDATE: Chuck Todd on why Booker’s lead has slipped: Insiders say Booker is “sloppy” and “unfocused.” If some money starts coming in to Lonegan — previously seen as a no-hoper given New Jersey’s blueness — it could be a real race.

NOW ON YOUTUBE: INSTAVISION. I talk with Michael Barone about immigration, politics, and his new book, Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics.

SPENGLER: Letting Obama Force a Constitutional Crisis Is the Best Republican Choice.

On the other hand, there’s this from Liz Peek: Obama Snookers GOP into Government Shutdown.

UPDATE: Peter Ingemi: If the shutdown is good for Democrats, why are they so angry? Because Republicans are showing unexpected backbone.

IRS SCANDAL PUNISHMENT: Lois Lerner’s Pension Could Be as Much as $102,600/Year, $3.96 Million Lifetime.

JAMES TARANTO: The Case Against Hope:

This column vigorously disagrees. We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly. We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.

We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.

Hope, in other words, poses a moral hazard: It can be a species of pathological altruism. And consider the perversity of the Post’s logic as applied to the dramatic arc of Soviet communism: By the editorialists’ reckoning, those of us who cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall were heartless boors indulging in Schadenfreude.

Well, perhaps some of them did feel that way.

SHUTDOWN THEATER BACKFIRES (CONT’D): WWII veterans storm DC memorial closed by government shutdown. What kind of schmuck puts barricades around an open-air park that’s normally open 24/7/365? First class.

UPDATE: Rand Paul: Some government idiot sent goons to barricade the memorial.

AND THAT’S PROBABLY PUSHING IT: Just 6.6 percent of EPA employees are ‘essential.’

IT’S BINZ NICE: Ron Binz, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Nominee, Withdraws After Senate Pushback. “Binz’s nomination met objections from coal interests and conservative groups, as well as Republicans and a key Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It was unusual for a FERC nominee to draw so much scrutiny, given the relative obscurity of the commission.”

ED DRISCOLL: Eliminationist Rhetoric: New Republic Wants Obama to Send in Tanks Against GOP. You know, I’m beginning to think that lefties don’t believe there’s any sort of legitimate opposition. I wonder what E.J. Dionne has to say?