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BUT CAN YOU REBUT AN ACTOR WHO REALLY DOES TALK OUT OF HIS ASS? The latest video from Reason TV.

RELATED: Jim Carrey Backlash on eBay for His Anti-Gun Video Mysteriously Disappears. As has the key that releases the caps lock on Carrey’s computer, apparently.

SESAME STREET OR PEYTON PLACE: EXCLUSIVE: ‘Sesame Street’ star Roscoe Orman leaves ex ‘destitute’.

BARBARA WALTERS RETIRING NEXT YEAR:

Barbara Walters is ready to announce her retirement. Sources confirm to Page Six that she will step down in May 2014.

Our source says the 83-year-old newscaster will be sent off with a year of specials leading up to her retirement, which will also see her leaving her show “The View.”

The source said, “She’s one of a kind and what she has done is remarkable. There will be an announcement about her retirement soon.”

Deadline was first to report today that the veteran TV journalist is ready to hang up her mic.

That report is consistent with the “youth movement” (comparatively speaking) that’s been sweeping through other networks. The decade worth of train wrecks on The View — not the least of which were Rosie’s 9/11 Trutherisms and Whoopi’s Moon Landing Truther moment — will certainly tarnish Walters’ legacy.

UPDATE: Was Walters ambushed by ABC? “It seems ABC News may have done to Walters what they did to Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and what NBC just did to Jay Leno and Matt Lauer. My source says that Walters had only discussed retiring officially from ABC News, not ‘The View.’ She actually owns a piece of that show.”

DON’T WORRY, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. UNTIL IT DOES: What Would America Look Like After ‘Getting Cyprused’?

‘A NOBLE WAY TO LOSE MONEY:’ California’s public employee pension system has lost millions of dollars on its green investments, which a top investment officer for the fund called “a noble way to lose money:”

CalPERS has $900 million invested in clean tech, which has seen an annualized return of negative 9.7 percent, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

Those losses are ultimately passed on to taxpayers, who pay for public workers’ pensions.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t, to coin a phrase.

TWO REDFORDS IN ONE, REDUX: To follow up on our Insta-post this morning, this headline was inevitable: “Robert Redford writes off Bob Woodward.” So for Redford these days, it’s Bill Ayers, Si, Woodward, No.

“The Company You Keep,” indeed.

THE EPA’S ‘MAKE SURE NOTHING GETS DONE UNLESS WE LIKE IT’ MANDATE:

As described, this is a vast expansion of the law which first gave rise to “environmental impact statements” decades ago. These already odious monuments to overwhelming paperwork and institutionalized busywork will apparently morph into far more burdensome “environmental and climate change impact statements.”

Carrying through with the logic, virtually any attempt at economic expansion or improvement could be affected, not just “major projects.” Such statements could, and I believe eventually would, be required for any government or private-sector construction project, and perhaps even for an ordinary business decision which has the subjectively determined potential to increase carbon emissions, meaning almost any project or business action, large or small.

But then, wide swatches of “Progressivism” have been against progress, and standing athwart history yelling “stop” for quite some time.

RELATED: Anti-science religious fanatics attack President Obama, suggest conspiracy.

A FORMER STUDENT WRITES THAT THE TENNESSEE SUPREME COURT IS CONSIDERING ADDING A “SPEECH CODE” TO THE RULES OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT, banning racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. speech in the course of professional conduct. Strictly interpreted, I think this rule would prevent attorneys from encouraging affirmative action, but I rather doubt that’s what’s intended.

Personally, I think the bar would be better off focusing on giving poor people access to quality representation at reasonable fees, but that seems less of a priority, which tells you all you need to know about the role of “professional ethics” in general.

UPDATE: Here’s the proposed rule. And here are some comments.

HOW CAN WE BOMB THEM INTO THE STONE AGE WHEN THEY’RE ALREADY THERE: U.S. embassy in Seoul warns North Korea with photo: This B-2 stealth bomber is just across border. 

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Types Of Guys Who Are NOT Husband Material.

CENSORSHIP: Comcast Tells New Jersey Gun Shop Owner that His Ads Cannot Show Guns — or Even Archery Gear!

Comcast employee Al Sharpton is not going to like this news one bit.

ILLINOIS LAW MUST OUTLAW STALKING, NOT ENCOURAGE IT:

Yes, that’s correct; during labor disputes, Illinois’s law against “aggravated stalking” does not apply to union organizers (Public Act 097-0468). This leads to a simple and logical question: is it ever acceptable to engage in stalking? Apparently, the answer in the Land of Lincoln is yes.

For anyone who engages in aggravated stalking in Illinois, it is a Class 3 felony with a “second or subsequent conviction” serving as a Class 2 felony. The penalty for the crime is serious and it should be. That’s what makes the exemption for organized labor — a special interest — so outrageous and inexcusable.

But unfortunately, Illinois is not alone; it is joined by California, Pennsylvania and Nevada. These states have placed the interests of Big Labor bosses above the safety of average citizens.

Unexpectedly.

THE COST EXPLOSION OF OBAMACARE BEGINS TO HIT HOME: Ed Morrissey in the Fiscal Times.

THE CHILD PHILOSOPHER.

THE SEXY KISS IS THE 2 FEMALES. “One of Time’s two new cover photos declaring ‘gay marriage already won’ looks like a wedding kiss. The other looks more like a makeout session.” I love how — straining to be properly gay-friendly — TIME let the real nature of homophobia show. I call sexism!

DID DANA MILBANK CALL CLARENCE THOMAS AN OREO? No. He called him a tagalong.

NBC “TODAY” AND “TONIGHT” PR CATASTROPHES ARE THE SAME, Roger Friedman posits at Showbiz411:

There’s a lot of explosive talk today about Matt Lauer leaving the Today show. It began with a New York magazine piece, continued into a second story on Deadline.com about NBC reaching out to Anderson Cooper to replace him, and has now echoed into the New York Times. The connection I still haven’t seen: that what’s going on with “Today” show this week is what happened to the “Tonight” show last week. Both shows are on NBC, and the signals being sent, however awkwardly, are coming from the same place: the new management.

As an NBC expert pointed to out to me today: Comcast wants all the old people out. I don’t mean senior citizens, although maybe that’s so. But they want a fresh look to a dead network. And that means Jay Leno and Matt Lauer. “Remember, the “New” NBC aka Comcast wants to get away from the old. Look at Fallon,” says my expert.

These seemingly chaotic changes at the networks have one thing in common: fear — and not just of ratings. (Although at bottom-dwelling NBC, that’s a big part of it.)

“A year ago Andrew Breitbart made what I thought was an absurd prediction: ‘In five years, all of this is gone. The media, all of it. Gone.’ Something like that,” Ace of Spades writes. “Well, it might not be five years, and it might not be completely gone, but ground is starting to shake beneath us. Plates are shifting. Grand houses may well fall.”

Read the whole thing. ™

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: Hunters Strike Back, Begin Boycotting Colorado Over New Gun Laws.

GERMAN PAPER WARNS OF COMING ICE AGE: We may yet see some of the more grizzled would-be climate scientists who warned that global cooling was about to destroy the earth in the 1970s, told us that global warming was about to destroy the earth in more recent decades switch back to telling us that global cooling is soon to destroy the earth. And all the while championing the same socialist formula to prevent mankind’s destruction — which is no doubt just right around the corner:

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AS THEY SAY IN POKER, if you’re at the table and you don’t see a sucker, it’s you. Or in this case, all of us.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: AP ‘reports’ Va. GOP pushed voter ID bill after ‘more modest’ law didn’t stop Obama victory.

FREE SPEECH UNDER FIRE IN MICHIGAN CATTLE FIELD:

Is it illegal to paint a political message on the side of a makeshift hay loft and leave it in your cattle pasture? If you live in Gaines Township, Mich., apparently, yes. Vern Verduin did that, painting “Marxism/Socialism = Poverty & hunger” and “Obama’s ‘mission accomplished.’ 8% unemployment. 16 trillion debt” on the side of two tractor trailers on his 40-acre farm.

For doing so, Verduin has now landed in court, having run afoul of a local zoning rule that prohibits political signs larger than 20 square-feet in size.

As the Professor would say: Tar. Feathers.

WILL SEQUESTER SEE UNCLE SAM CEASING SNAIL SEX STUDIES? Feds Spending $880,000 To Study Snail Sex.

No, really: Snail sex.

Meanwhile, from micro to macro: Feds Waste $3.8 Million to ‘Decrease Human-Elephant Conflict.’

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES SEEM “REAL”:  Researchers at the University of Liege have published a paper revealing that the phenomenological characteristics of near death experience “memories”– tunnels of light, the sensation of floating away and arriving in another place– are closer to those of “real” memories than “imagined” memories.

The unanswered question:  Are these individuals’ brains “lying” to them, or are these memories real?