SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE EDITORIAL: President Obama’s shameful death-benefit theater.

The Obama administration insisted Tuesday it had no choice but to withhold death benefits to relatives of 1st Lt. Jennifer Moreno, a 25-year-old soldier born and raised in San Diego, and four other soldiers killed since the partial government shutdown began Oct. 1.

This is ridiculous and perverse. President Barack Obama has used an expansive — and some legal scholars believe extreme — interpretation of his powers to unilaterally rewrite key provisions of the No Child Left Behind law, the sweeping 2002 measure that drastically reshaped federal education policies. In similar fashion, the president has unilaterally rewritten key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, his sweeping 2010 measure that is drastically reshaping federal public health policies. His administration has also essentially rewritten federal laws governing illegal immigration and penalties for drug possession.

Just this month, the federal government has authorized the spending of billions of dollars since the partial shutdown began without explicit congressional approval. . . . It is an appalling commentary on the president and his administration that they chose to bully the families of dead American soldiers for perceived political gain.

Shame on Barack Obama.

Yeah this is a dickish move. But, you know . . .

Related: Democrats Going Off-Message On Shutdown Theater.

Cracks in the monolithic wall Democrats have put up against reopening any individual part of government unless all of government is funded in one bill are starting to show.

Today, Washington, D.C., mayor Vince Gray and D.C. House delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton crashed a news conference being held by Senate majority leader Harry Reid on the Capitol steps.

Reid didn’t appreciate the company. As Gray leaned into Reid and demanded federal money start flowing so the District can pay its bills, Reid responded, “I’m on your side. Don’t screw this up.”

Reid was probably nervous because at the mayor’s earlier news conference, Gray had stood next to Republican congressman Darrell Issa as he criticized the Democratic-led Senate for holding up the District spending bill, which has already passed the House.

The House is working. The Senate isn’t. It’s becoming obvious.

UPDATE: More Suggestive Evidence That The Republicans Are Winning. “If Obama’s supporters are losing their arguments and their minds, that suggests the Republicans are hanging in there. My two cents: Obama’s ‘I won’t negotiate because they are being unreasonable and intransigent’ pose won’t hold as the public begins to see Obama as unreasonable and intransigent. I just don’t see ‘I’m crazier than they are’ as a winning play.”

Hey, you know what looks unreasonable and intransigent? Removing the handles from water fountains on federal trails.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments:

Wanna get to Harry Reid? Call all those hotels and casinos in Las Vegas and tell them you won’t play until Harry backs down. Tell the books you won’t bet on sporting events, especially NFL games. They can get to Harry far more quickly and effectively than anybody else. Boycott Vegas.

You know, that just might work.

IS CHOICE BAD? OkCupid Lets Users Choose a Thin or Overweight Mate. Is That a Bad Thing?

PROTECT YOUR FAMILY: At Amazon, 20% off Kidde Fire Safety Products.

Plus, Fall Picks: New Women’s Watches.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Crowdfunded security in Oakland – It is every block for themselves just like Judge Dredd.

SO IT’S NOT JUST A LAME TV PLOT: Passenger With No Flying Experience Lands Plane When Pilot Incapacitated.

WARNING: Don’t let fear of bioweapons kill off science.

IF YOU’RE IN THE CAMBRIDGE/BOSTON AREA, you can meet chem-blogger Derek Lowe tomorrow.

SUICIDAL SEX: “In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, we show why escalating stress hormones during the breeding season of some species of small insect-eating marsupials (but in no other mammals) cause immune system collapse, haemorrhaging, infections and death after mating in all males.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Circuits of graphitic nanoribbons grown from aligned DNA templates.

SCIENCE: Evidence that Sprite might be a great hangover cure.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD AT SHUTDOWN THEATER: Victory at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm — National Park Service Allows the Farm to Open.

CHARLES BLAHOUS: ObamaCare’s Financial Unraveling: Predictable And Predicted.

WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO: Elite Women, Hypergamy, and Why The Sisterhood Is Breaking Down. Plus, how feminism has hurt equality.

WHAT’S UNPRECEDENTED is Obama’s refusal to negotiate.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 153.

TECHNOLOGY: Mercedes’ Driverless Research Car Looks Freaking Amazing.

MATH: The Perils of Putting One’s Faith in Defined Benefit Pensions. “You might think that underfunding pension plans is the sole purview of unscrupulous local and state governments. Unfortunately, irrational optimism, an inability to accurately plan for the future, and avarice are all very human weaknesses exhibited by people in all walks of life—even faith-based and church-affiliated hospitals and charities. . . .It’s interesting that charities and governments are ripping employees off on pensions worse than private businesses. The answer to this apparent puzzle isn’t that corporate CEOs are somehow more virtuous than men of the cloth or big city politicians; it’s that we have tough laws governing corporate pensions and weaker ones when it comes to charities and governments. We’ll also take this occasion to remind our readers why we think defined contribution pensions are the best bet for workers today. There are no pension programs that are totally risk free, or course. Life just doesn’t work that way. But too many people continue to underestimate the risk of defined benefit plans in a turbulent economic and political landscape.”

ILYA SOMIN: Foot Voting vs. Ballot Box Voting.

His new book is Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.

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OBVIOUSLY, THE PRESS HASN’T BEEN DOING ITS JOB: Obama Approval Drops to 37%; Disapproval at 53%. I think it’s the heavyhanded “Washington Monument Strategy” shutdown theater. The thing is, everyone’s heard of the Washington Monument Strategy nowadays. Also, it just looks mean.

TITLES OF NOBILITY: Appeals Courts Give Misbehaving Prosecutors The Privilege Of Anonymity.

Last month, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a prosecutor in San Mateo County, Calif., committed “textbook” misconduct when she “knowingly elicited and then failed to correct false testimony” during an armed robbery trial. A judge from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California also found misconduct in the case, but ruled it was a “harmless error” and upheld the conviction of the defendant, La Carl Martez Dow. The appeals court panel overturned that ruling, and Dow’s conviction.

But an important detail was missing from both those rulings — the prosecutor’s name, Jennifer Ow. At the time of Martez Dow’s conviction, she was an assistant district attorney for San Mateo county. She currently holds the same title in Nevada County, Calif.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal alleging misconduct by a federal prosecutor who made racially offensive remarks during a drug trial in Texas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate opinion that excoriated the prosecutor, who, she wrote, “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our Nation.”

“It is deeply disappointing to see a representative of the United States resort to this base tactic more than a decade into the 21st century,” she wrote. “Such conduct diminishes the dignity of our criminal justice system and undermines respect for the rule of law. We expect the Government to seek justice, not to fan the flames of fear and prejudice.”

But Sotomayor didn’t name the prosecutor, either. And while her opinion attracted a fair amount of media attention, those initial accounts also failed to give the prosecutor’s name.

You can’t have anonymity and accountability. So, apparently, the courts don’t want accountability here.

LIZ PEEK: Why The Reviled Tea Party Was Right About ObamaCare.

JAMES TARANTO ON OBAMA’S “BREAKING THE FEVER” TALK: The metaphor is more apt than he realizes.

So if America’s body politic continues to run a fever, that means it is still suffering from the underlying illness. And if the Republicans are fevered–or are the fever–then it follows that Obama and the Democrats are the infectious agent.

When you think about it this way, the metaphor makes perfect sense. The body politic heated up during 2009 and 2010, as Obama overcame its resistance and advanced his agenda. The 2010 election was a massive immune response, which seemed to have restored a measure of health.

By 2012, when both Obama and House Republicans were re-elected, the fever seemed to have broken on its own. Instead, as we now know, the Internal Revenue Service administered an anti-inflammatory treatment that merely masked the symptoms of the underlying infection.

Taking a longer view, one could see America’s current condition as a chronic one, which has gradually grown worse over decades. “Chronic infections become chronic in the first place due to an insufficient initial immune response,” Durant notes. If a virulent strain of the bug has now produced an acute fever, it may be a sign that the country has some vigor left.

So is Obama starting to feel the heat?