RICHARD EPSTEIN: Declaring War On ISIS.

GOOD NEWS: Ebola Outbreak In Nigeria Appears To Be Over. “With quick and coordinated action by some of its top doctors, Africa’s most populous country seems to have beaten its first Ebola outbreak, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: For Next Attorney General, Obama Should Reach Across The Aisle.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 509.

SO I GUESS NOBODY’S LAUGHING AT CLINT EASTWOOD’S “EMPTY CHAIR” BIT ANYMORE: Report: Obama Has Missed over Half His Second-Term Daily Intel Briefings.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Further Report: Obama has not Missed any of his Second-Term Fundraising Trips, vacations, MSNBC engagements/weddings, or golf outings.”

TOM MAGUIRE ON THE OBAMA HOME INVASION: Who Didn’t Let The Dogs Out? “Guard dogs penned up, doors unlocked – where were the rodeo clowns?” Actually, I think he’d left the White House just a few minutes earlier.

HAIL SHALE: America About to Dethrone Saudi Arabia as Liquid Petroleum King.

The U.S. shale boom is about to hit another big milestone, as it looks like fracking will propel American liquid petroleum production (that includes oil and natural gas liquids) past Saudi Arabia for the first time in nearly a quarter century. . . .

The natural gas liquids portion is largely a byproduct of drilling for shale gas, and are used as a feedstock for petrochemical companies (like BASF, which recently decided to move more of its operations into the United States). Take those NGLs out of the equation, and Saudi Arabia and Russia both edge out the United States on crude production. But American oil output is expected to break 9 million barrels per day sometime this year, edging closer to Russia’s 10.1 million b/d and Saudi’s 9.7 million b/d.

With productivity continuing to rise, the United States has a chance to become the single biggest producer of crude oil sometime in the near future. If you had said that a decade ago, you would’ve been laughed at and called a fool. What a difference fracking makes.

Yeah, it was just a few years ago that all the Smart People^TM knew we had passed peak oil. Now you don’t seem to hear much about “peak oil,” do you?

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teen Jailed for Zero Tolerance Offense, Starved for 36 Hours.

Why would you place your kids in the hands of people like this? Good question.

YEAH, IT’S NOT LIKE OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TAKE AN OATH TO DEFEND IT OR ANYTHING: Leading Dem insider: Save America; scrap the Constitution. I don’t see why we need a new Constitution; we’re barely using the one we’ve got.

AT AMAZON, deals on Women’s Halloween Costumes. Okay, they’re not all slutty. Oh, who am I kidding? They pretty much are, as you can see. Also Men’s Halloween Costumes. Plus, Halloween Costumes for Babies. The latter categories haven’t succumbed to the “slutty” trend. Yet.

Plus, the new Hoover Power Path Deluxe Carpet Washer.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: For Next Attorney General, Obama Should Reach Across The Aisle. Gay-marriage advocate and former Solicitor General Ted Olson, say.

Key bit:

Perhaps President Obama — and, for that matter, future presidents — should take a lesson from the way we handle the Department of Defense, and apply it to the Department of Justice: Consider naming someone outside his own party as attorney general.

This frequently happens with secretaries of Defense, and it has been of benefit to the administrations that have done it. FDR picked a Republican, Henry Stimson, to be secretary of War in 1940, and that meant that the war — and the war’s casualties — became a bipartisan matter instead of fodder for partisan attacks. President Obama retained George W. Bush’s Defense secretary, Robert Gates, for most of his first term. He replaced Gates with another Republican, Chuck Hagel, in that position.

Having a Defense secretary from the other party makes war bipartisan, and reassures members of the opposition that the powers of the sword aren’t being abused. Likewise, naming an attorney general from the opposite party would tend to make the administration of justice bipartisan, and would provide considerable reassurance, as Holder’s tenure in office emphatically did not, that the powers of law enforcement were not being abused in service of partisan ends. In an age of all-encompassing criminal laws, and pervasive government spying, that’s a big deal.

Odds that Obama will take my advice? About the same as the odds that he has nothing to cover up.

ALAN GURA IN THE HARVARD LAW REVIEW: The Second Amendment As A Normal Right.

THIS ISN’T SURPRISING, SINCE THE PURPOSE OF “HOLISTIC ADMISSIONS” IS TO ENABLE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WHILE MAKING IT LESS OBVIOUS: Holistic Admissions Linked to Diversity in Health Fields.

JIM WEBB looking more serious about challenging Hillary Clinton.

In his speech last week at the National Press Club, Webb spoke to what he believes is a sense of economic dread and war weariness in the electorate.

“It’s rare when the economy crashes at the same time we are at war,” he said. “The centrifugal forces of social cohesion are spinning so out of control that the people at the very top exist in a distant outer orbit, completely separated in their homes, schools and associations from those of us who are even in the middle.”

Hmm. Sounds like he’s been reading Joel Kotkin’s new book. Which every aspiring candidate should.

What I like about Jim Webb is that he’s not a typical lefty weenie. On the other hand, he behaved poorly in that gun incident. More on that here.

BYRON YORK: Ugly Senate fight could await Obama’s attorney general nominee.

President Obama has a pretty obvious deadline for nominating a successor to departing Attorney General Eric Holder. If Democrats lose control of the Senate in November, they’ll still run things until newly-elected members arrive in January. So just to be safe, if the president wants guaranteed confirmation of a new attorney general, he’ll need to pick one soon. That way, even if Republicans win the Senate, and even if Obama’s choice is unpopular with the GOP, lame-duck Democrats will still be able to steamroll the opposition and confirm a new Attorney General.

But it could be very, very ugly.

The White House claims there is ample precedent for a lame-duck nomination. In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

There hasn’t been an attorney general nominated and confirmed in a lame-duck session since before the Civil War. So there’s not much in the way of direct precedent, at least in the last 150 years.

Particularly since Holder has been unprecedentedly partisan in his “scandal-goalie” role.

RE-ELECTING KAY HAGAN WILL NOT SERVE THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY, I’M AFRAID: Poll Predicts Libertarian Spoiler in North Carolina Senate Race. Though it’s not clear who he’ll pull more from.

ROGER SIMON: Liberals As Low Information Voters. “In recent months I have been startled by many examples of this. In a casual conversation, an Ivy League graduate and author of several best-selling books asked me what I meant by ‘quantitative easing,’ although it has been one of the keys to the economic policies of the last half-dozen years. Since the man is highly intelligent, my conclusion was he didn’t want to know about such details because they would lead to him having to examine long-held assumptions, assumptions it would be uncomfortable to question for a whole set of reasons. Remember, these are people who voted for Obama, twice, and now are just becoming aware that many of us consider him the worst president ever and have pretty good reasons. And the public is beginning to agree with us. This is hard to process.”

CAMILLE PAGLIA: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil.

Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender.

To their proponents, that’s not a bug, but a feature.

ROLL CALL: Cornyn Warns Against Confirming Holder Successor in Lame Duck.

JOEL KOTKIN: A New Kind Of Authoritarianism: Choosing fortune over freedom. “Increasingly, authoritarian regimes are rising around the world, led by a pesky, resource-rich Russia and a new full-blown superpower, China. Today, few regimes are becoming more democratic, and many, such as Turkey, are evolving toward one-party, voter-blessed, autocracies. These regimes, like their fascist and communist antecedents, often show a kind of contempt for the messy work of pluralistic decision-making and constitutional restraint.” To be fair, so does our young President.

MARK UDALL STEPS IN IT: Is vulnerable Democratic senator a 9/11 ‘truther’? Video at the link.

UH HUH: White House: Obama wasn’t passing buck with ISIS comment.

President Obama wasn’t passing the buck by saying intelligence officials underestimated the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the White House said Monday.

Press secretary Josh Earnest said officials were aware of the threat posed by ISIS, but misjudged the will of the Iraqi military to fight back and how successful the terror group would be at capturing territory. He said “everybody” — from the intelligence community to the White House — made the same mistake, but that Obama was ultimately responsible.

“The president’s commander in chief and he’s the one who takes responsibility for ensuring that we have the kinds of policies in place that are required to protect our interests around the globe,” Earnest said.

Reporters grilled Earnest about Obama’s remarks Sunday on “60 Minutes,” where he at one point said Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged misreading “what had been taking place in Syria” with regards to ISIS.

The remark has created a firestorm, with Republicans and some former intelligence officials arguing the president was trying to shirk responsibility.

Well, that’s because, you know, he was. In the words of Ron Fournier: “I, me, my. It’s their fault. I, me, my. It’s their fault. I, me, my. It’s their fault. I, me, my. It’s their fault. I, me, my …”

Related: Rogers: Intel officials warned Obama about ISIS ‘for over a year.’

But hey, the Hillary/Kerry shop’s still defending him: State: White House didn’t drop the ball on ISIS threat. Well, okay then.

ANNALS OF SMART DIPLOMACY: Obama Invites Indian Leader to Dinner While He Is Observing Religious Fast; Administration under fire for perceived insensitivity to Hindu traditions. Don’t they have people in the State Department who are supposed to know about stuff like that? . . .

REALLY, CHAMP? ‘CAUSE IT SEEMS LIKE YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN USING IT AS A MANUAL SINCE DAY ONE: Steny Hoyer: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ No Way to Run a Country.