PROPAGANDA: Jack Lail: White House photo access controls public image. “The Associated Press, the largest U.S. Wire service, has only been allowed to photograph Obama in his office on two occasions, according to Associated Press Director of Photography Santiago Lyon. Lyon said the administration’s control of photo access and use of official photos amounts to propaganda. He said no official explanation of the lack of access has been given and that greater access was common under previous presidential administrations.”

I’ve got an explanation. I’ll bet you can think of one on your own, though.

A PAPER FROM MARC GREENDORFER: Restoring Nobility to the Constitution: A Modern Approach to a Founding Principle. It’s about limiting special perks for officials, a la the Titles Of Nobility clause.

COMPETENCE: Cupcake Store Among Wrong Businesses Listed on State Obamacare Signup Site.

RICH LOWRY’S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS FOR 2013.

KORI SCHAKE: The Promise Of The American Dream: he United States offers hope and disappointment for immigrants from the developing world. Well, it offers hope and disappointment to those of us born here, too. Though oddly, the era of Hope has featured more than the usual amount of disappointment . . . .

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 174.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Obama getting pushback on Iran policy from . . . Bob Menendez. Then again, Menendez is known for taking an aggressive stance on foreign affairs.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WORKFORCE: William Galston: Unless men re-enter the job market, prospects for vigorous growth in the labor force are dim.

Participation in the workforce is falling, the pace of job creation is anemic, and long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high. Many newly created jobs pay less than those that disappeared during the Great Recession, so real wages are stagnating, and median household income is no higher than it was a quarter of a century ago.

Our condition looks no better when we compare ourselves to other nations. As my Brookings Institution colleague Gary Burtless has observed, the United States was once viewed as the home of the “employment miracle.” As recently as 1989, it was a leader in labor-force participation and employment rates among the world’s most developed economies. That is no longer the case. . . .

What we do know is that the start of the third millennium marked the end of a long cycle in the U.S. employment market. In the early 1960s, labor-force participation among men ages 25 to 64 began a slow steady decline from 95% to about 84% today, a trend masked by the surge of women into the labor force. But women’s participation in the labor force peaked in 2000 and has since declined by two percentage points. Unless men re-enter the job market, prospects for the resumption of vigorous growth in the U.S. labor force are dim.

Some analytical modesty is in order. Men have been withdrawing from the workforce for five decades—in good times and bad, in tight and slack labor markets, in periods of Keynesian stimulus and green-eyeshade austerity. No one is sure why.

Well, some people have an idea.

LIZ PEEK: How Obama Is Unwittingly Boosting Republicans.

Related: Why Extending The Obamacare Deadline Could Hurt Democrats In 2014. Of course, front-loading the debacle isn’t going to do much good either.

SPYING: Justin Amash, bipartisan group introduce bill to curb NSA spy programs.

NEW DEALS AT THE Amazon Fall Outlet Event.

Plus, Amazon’s most popular coupon deals.

Also, Warehouse Deals in Sporting Goods.

And, today only: Up to 64% Off “Six Feet Under” and “Big Love.”

OUTLIER POLL? OR SIDE-EFFECT OF THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE? McAuliffe poll shock: Democrat up by only 4 points in Virginia governor’s race.

UPDATE: In Virginia, signs Ken Cuccinelli is the ‘Comeback Kid.’ I haven’t been following this race as closely as Paul Bedard, but if McAuliffe loses — or even underperforms the polls of a couple of weeks ago — I think the ObamaCare debacle will be a major reason why.

PROF. W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: PBS squanders opportunity to offer ‘content that educates’ in ‘War of the Worlds’ doc.

PBS could have confronted head-on the question of whether the radio show, which aired 75 years ago tomorrow night on CBS, really did provoke hysteria and mass panic in the United States. That’s the conventional wisdom, and it makes for a deliciously good yarn — that Americans back then were so skittish or doltish or unaccustomed to electronic media that they readily believed the story of the lethal Martian invasion of Earth, as described in The War of the Worlds broadcast.

The PBS documentary embraced the conventional wisdom.

But a growing body of scholarship — which the documentary utterly ignored — has impugned the conventional wisdom and has offered a compelling counter narrative: The War of the Worlds program sowed no widespread chaos and alarm. Instead, listeners in overwhelming numbers recognized the program for what it was: A clever radio show that aired in its scheduled Sunday time slot and featured the not-unfamiliar voice of the program’s 23-year-old star, Orson Welles.

This scholarship is neither obscure nor inaccessible.

But it’s inconvenient to the preferred narrative and hence ignored. Because that’s how PBS rolls.

ACCUSED. ALSO GUILTY. Washington Post: Obama accused of breaking promise to consumers as health plans cancel policies.

L.A. TIMES: Publicly, the White House continues to defend the president’s pre-launch salesmanship. Privately, some officials say they wish they’d left a little wiggle room in the healthcare rollout. “With the federal website hobbled by bad design and thousands of policyholders receiving cancellation notices, Obama’s promises are not being met — prompting charges of deception from some Republicans and concessions from some allies that elements of the law were oversold. The fallout is only the latest chapter in this White House’s three-year struggle to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act, which could come to define the president’s legacy. Since signing it into law, the president has variously defended it, promoted it, simplified it and hyped it. But polling shows he has never fully sold, nor educated, the public on the vast new government healthcare program.”

He lied to get it passed. He knew he was lying. Now it’s catching up to him.

CHARLIE MARTIN: The Arithmetic Absurdity of ObamaCare.

JAMES TARANTO: ObamaCare Apologetics: A lie, dissociative disorder or what?

So the administration knew full well in 2010 that Obama’s promise was a false one. Yet he was still making it in 2012. The White House website still declares: “If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law.” Most astonishingly, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett was still making it yesterday, when she tweeted: “FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.”

The latter sentence is true if you construe it with a Clintonian literalism. In every case in which “change is required,” it is also true that “insurance companies change existing plans.” But the former sentence is a brazen falsehood. Insurance companies are changing existing plans because ObamaCare forces them to.

Yep. Might as well say that GE just suddenly decided to quit selling incandescent bulbs.

Related: Obamacare team offers multiple self-contradictory explanations for coverage cancellations.

HOWIE CARR: “First he ruins the health care system. Now he wants to come in and wreck the World Series. . . . Yesterday, the White House was dithering back and forth over whether to go to Game 6 tonight. They haven’t been this confused since they were trying to decide whether to bomb Syria.”

DAVID FEITH & BARI WEISS: The United States of Lou Reed: Sometimes rock ‘n’ roll can accomplish more to promote freedom than translating the Federalist Papers. This is true domestically, too.

IT’S NOT GOING SO WELL FOR THEM: White House tries to explain Obama’s claim that all Americans can keep health plans.

Here’s the explanation: They couldn’t have passed the bill — which barely passed — without lying. So, they lied. And it worked until after the election.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Pharmacy Schools Turning Out Too Many Grads. “From 1987 to 2012, the number of accredited pharmacy schools in the United States grew from 72 to 128. Existing schools expanded their class sizes, as well. Instead of creating 6,000 new doctors of pharmacy a year, as was the case in 2002, U.S. higher education is now putting out around 13,000.”

WASHINGTON POST: Kathleen Sebelius, welcome to an unwelcome Washington tradition: The deathwatch.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Taxpayers pay to hire workers’ lawyers in IRS scandal.

A scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups might soon start hitting taxpayers in the wallet. The Justice Department has hired two law firms here to represent the personal interests of 19 Internal Revenue Service workers in a federal lawsuit filed against the agency and its employees because of this year’s targeting scandal, The Cincinnati Enquirer has learned. The government has contracted with the firms of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP and Squire Sanders LLP for up to $200 an hour plus expenses.

The federal government often pays for personal representation of its employees, experts say.

Nice perk. Those are two of the fanciest firms in Ohio. I wonder if they’ll have to treat this free representation as income . . . .

WELL, OBAMA DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING, SO I GUESS THE BUILDING WAS ACTING ON ITS OWN: White House OKd spying on allies: U.S. intelligence officials say NSA and other U.S. intelligence agency staff members are said to be angry at President Obama for denying knowledge of the spying. Wait, before the tape self-destructed, it didn’t say that the President would disavow all knowledge of the mission?