CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE LAWYERS OF WAR:

David Woods, the HuffPo’s military correspondent, cites it as a “good-faith effort” to uphold “American values.” But nobody is suggesting that this is necessary because American troops routinely violate the norms of civilized warfare. Instead, this seems to be an effort to sanitize something that is inherently messy (“War is heck”). This is a classic peacenik proposition: the whole world can be tamed, and not only that, so too can the means by which it is tamed.

The overlawyering of our armed forces is not new—it has been growing steadily since the post-Vietnam era. It’s part of a general trend to officialize and bureaucratize American life. Ask any doctor how much time she spends filling out paperwork.

The proliferation of legalese and formalism in American institutions generally is one of the forces undermining our national spirit and slowing our economic growth. But it’s particularly nasty and dangerous when it comes to the business of war. Our politicians keep heaping new burdens on the armed forces, sending them on muddled missions with impossible orders, forcing them to jump through various hoops for the sake of political correctness, and hampering them at every turn with threats of prosecution by bloodless bureaucrats who’ve never known or seen war.

Accountability is important, but increasingly in our society accountability is for the little people. The powerful and the well connected hire lawyers; the ordinary person gets monitored by them. We don’t have policy malpractice lawyers investigating the geniuses who invaded Libya and abandoned Iraq, but the poor kids trying to carry out the crazy orders that come down from on high will get dinged if they put a foot wrong. No doubt there are some lawyers checking to see that those 3,000 Americans sent into the Ebola hot zone don’t break any rules—but there aren’t any lawyers and there isn’t any law to make sure that the people who sent them there knew or really even cared what they were doing.

Yeah, for that we need to bring back tar and feathers.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Supreme Court May Yet Blunt Obama’s ‘Disparate Impact’ Weapon.

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SO I GUESS WE SHOULD GET READY FOR TWO WEEKS OF NONSTOP RACE-BAITING: Memo: “Crushing Democratic Losses” If Blacks Don’t Turn Out In Big Numbers.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire emails:

Is Obama likely to support an Ebola travel ban from West Africa two weeks before the election, thereby stepping on the “racist Republican haters” message? Is our new political fixer Ebola Czar going to give that advice?

He will have more flexibility after the election.

In so many ways.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Male strippers on Ebola-infected nurse’s flight pretty appalled by CDC’s irresponsibility. “The experience of these men speaks to the CDC’s larger problems in gaining trust with the American people to fight an Ebola outbreak. The agency, whose approval numbers are falling precipitously, has routinely made assurances that were later proven untrue, failed to be as proactive as Axl and Taylor, and made moves so obviously reckless that humble, normal Americans look at the agency’s conduct and quite rationally conclude it’s not to be trusted. This is not panic or the result of some political campaign to undermine the CDC. This is self-inflicted. For instance, the CDC told Vinson, who has been exposed to Ebola and had a slight fever, that she could jump on a plane to the Midwest. It also failed to anticipate the need to monitor a nurse who may have handled an Ebola patient’s samples. That nurse is now isolated in her cabin on a cruise ship, which are of course infamous hotbeds for contagious disease outbreaks. Vinson, for her part, asked the CDC if she should fly and made a mistake in trusting their advice. Axl and Taylor aren’t making the same mistake, and many Americans will be inclined to be wary as well. Again, that reaction is a direct result of the CDC’s actions in handling Ebola.”

UPDATE: Cruise ship woman tests negative for Ebola.

HE DOESN’T MISS A LOT: Limbaugh Pounces After CDC Chief Says Ebola Flight Ban Would Be Pointless Since Illegals Can Cross Border Anyway. “Do you know what he just said there? …. He just threw amnesty overboard! He, he, he just threw amnesty under the bus. He just threw Obama’s precious open borders under the bus. He says if we try to eliminate travel, then they’re going to come here illegally — acknowledging there are others already doing that!”

FCC COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI: The government wants to study ‘social pollution’ on Twitter.

Named “Truthy,” after a term coined by TV host Stephen Colbert, the project claims to use a “sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex network models” to distinguish between memes that arise in an “organic manner” and those that are manipulated into being.

But there’s much more to the story. Focusing in particular on political speech, Truthy keeps track of which Twitter accounts are using hashtags such as #teaparty and #dems. It estimates users’ “partisanship.” It invites feedback on whether specific Twitter users, such as the Drudge Report, are “truthy” or “spamming.” And it evaluates whether accounts are expressing “positive” or “negative” sentiments toward other users or memes.

The Truthy team says this research could be used to “mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”

Hmm. A government-funded initiative is going to “assist in the preservation of open debate” by monitoring social media for “subversive propaganda” and combating what it considers to be “the diffusion of false and misleading ideas”? The concept seems to have come straight out of a George Orwell novel.

The NSF has already poured nearly $1 million into Truthy. To what end? Why is the federal government spending so much money on the study of your Twitter habits?

Some possible hints as to Truthy’s real motives emerge in a 2012 paper by the project’s leaders, in which they wrote ominously of a “highly-active, densely-interconnected constituency of right-leaning users using [Twitter] to further their political views.”

Tar. Feathers.

BILL QUICK: We Are All Preppers Now? I’ve Been a Prepper For Years!

You should read his disaster novel, Lightning Fall.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: How the feds block Ebola cures.

We have technology to potentially control Ebola and other viral outbreaks today. But the federal bureaucracy refuses to catch up with 21st-century science.

For example, diagnostic startup Nanobiosym has an iPhone-sized device that can accurately detect Ebola and other infectious diseases in less than an hour.

Two other companies, Synthetic Genomics and Novartis, have the capacity to create synthetic vaccine viruses for influenza and other infectious diseases in only four days. Both firms can also share data about outbreaks instantaneously and make real-time, geographically specific diagnosis and vaccine production possible.

These companies could start producing Ebola vaccine/treatments tomorrow — except that the Food and Drug Administration’s insistence on randomized studies and endless demands for more data means firms have to spend millions on paperwork instead of producing medicines.

And for every small company drained by such tactics, many others conclude it’s not even worth trying.

These advances aren’t available because the FDA is using 19th-century science to decide which medical technologies should be used in the 21st century. . . . Part of the problem: FDA scientists receive no reward for approving breakthroughs, but suffer public anger if but one person dies because a drug is misused. The price we pay for this culture of caution rises every day.

Sigh.

STACY MCCAIN lays down an old-fashioned Fisking. For a moment, it was 2002 again!

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BETTER PLANNING COULD HAVE AVOIDED THIS: Coast Guard Gets Blood Samples From Health Care Worker Quarantined on Ship. “A Coast Guard helicopter met a cruise ship in the Caribbean today to collect a blood sample today from the Dallas health care worker who handled clinical specimens from an Ebola-infected patient and is on board the boat, which is scheduled to dock Sunday morning. The lab worker remained on the boat, the Carnival Magic, according to a statement from Carnival.”

And by “better planning,” I mean pretty much any planning at all.

EBOLA’S GREATEST THREAT: A Third World Pandemic. I dunno, the third-world countries like Nigeria seem to have a better handle on things than we do. . . .

WITH ISIS ON THE MARCH AND EBOLA ON THE LOOSE, Obama spent today golfing with an ESPN host.

HUNTER BIDEN QUESTIONS: “a) Why was a 40+ year-old man allowed to enlist and b) why was a 40+ year-old man doing coke?” Answers: a) Joe Biden’s son, and b) Joe Biden’s son.

But I would like to see some investigative journalism into how he got a waiver that’s usually limited to people with critical skills that he did not possess.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is the Left Losing its Mind Over Campus Sex?

LAUGHING, CRYING, WHATEVER.

*Almost spits out coffee laughing* pic.twitter.com/WPeh6BVS1i

— Elissa Roberson (@ElissaRoberson) October 17, 2014

PUSHBACK: LA Cops’ Claim That All Cars Are Under Investigation Challenged in License Plate Camera Tussle.

FREE SPEECH: Court allows First Amendment claim based on alleged professor retaliation for paper ‘harshly critical of … lesbianism.’ “The Court questions whether a university can have a legitimate pedagogical interest in inviting students to engage in ‘incendiary’ and provocative speech on a topic and then punishing a student because he or she did just that. Simply because Plaintiff expressed views about homosexuality that some people may deem offensive does not deprive her views of First Amendment protection. Plaintiff has made out a plausible case that Hinkley ostracized her because of Hinkley’s personal disagreement with Plaintiff’s ideology, and not for a legitimate pedagogical purpose.”

WHY DOCTORS give ObamaCare a failing grade.

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EBOLA CZAR PREDICTED in 2001 commercial.

BOBBY JINDAL PUTS THE BOOT IN.

Stage 1 of Obama Crisis Management: Don’t worry, I got this.

— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) October 18, 2014

Stage 2 of Obama Crisis Management: I'm so mad.

— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) October 18, 2014

Stage 3 of Obama Crisis Management: More money will fix it.

— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) October 18, 2014

Stage 4 of Obama Crisis Management: Republicans are obstructing.

— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) October 18, 2014

Apparently we’re at Stage Two right now.

EBOLA: Demanding Perfection Ensures Failure.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER SOMEONE SURVIVES EBOLA?