TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 519.

JAKE TAPPER: Panetta’s Concerns Raise Worries Over President’s Handling of Ebola.

RON FOURNIER: Why the Colombian Hooker Scandal Matters: More than sex, the story is about nepotism, favoritism, credibility and the president’s safety. It’s certainly a window into how this White House works, and it’s not pretty. Notice that the working stiffs got fired, while the connected insider was protected.

FASTER, PLEASE: Shale Boom Has America Sitting Pretty.

The shale revolution has quickly and completely remade America’s energy landscape, leaving us in a much stronger position, both economically and geopolitically, than where we found ourselves just a decade ago. . . .

Cheap energy is key for economic growth, and a glut of natural gas is leading to a kind of small renaissance in American manufacturing, especially in energy-intensive industries. More fracking means more gas, lower prices, and growth potential for firms that use that gas. And then there’s the geopolitical aspect of the shale boom. . . .

America is poised to become the world’s top liquid petroleum producer, supplanting perennial hydrocarbon powerhouses like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Where just a decade ago we were busy building liquified natural gas (LNG) import terminals, now we’re busy converting those facilities to handle exports, and the possibility of opening up crude exports has entered the American energy discussion.

By lessening our dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas, the shale boom has given us more options abroad, and in some cases, as is intimated in the NYT story, has given America more clout in diplomatic standoffs.

There’s an economic success story here, and a geopolitical one as well—and both come courtesy of fracking.

And both come without any assistance from — and in fact in the face of some opposition from — the Obama Administration. Imagine what a competent president could do.

HEH: ‘Obama Drone’ Street Art Targets Gwyneth Paltrow Ahead of L.A. Fundraiser.

WHAT IT FELT LIKE to test the first submarine nuclear reactor.

AT AMAZON, check out the Halloween Shop. This year I’m going as an Ebola victim.

Also, up to 40% off selected Golf Clubs. Stock up now — you might be President someday!

PETER SUDERMAN ASKS THE QUESTION:

The details are complex, and the actual “misconduct”—hiring a prostitute in Colombia, where it’s legal to do so—is perhaps politically embarrassing but hardly misconduct at all, and certainly not the sort of thing likely to swing a not-very-close national election. And yet the administration apparently chose to delay findings and mislead the press about what happened anyway.

So the short version is this: The administration had evidence indicating that a young advance team member, who was also the child of a lobbyist-and-donor-turned-administration-staffer, was involved in a potentially embarrassing incident with a prostitute while serving as a member of the presidential advance team—and yet explicitly denied that this was the case, and also appears to have pressured independent investigators to delay and withhold evidence until after the election was over.

And the question the story raises is: If the White House was so determined to cover up this embarassing but relatively minor incident, what larger stories has the White House supressed or covered up that we don’t know about?

Well, the coverups we do know about — the IRS Scandal, Benghazi, etc. — are bad enough.

TOM BLUMER: The Not-Credible Shrinking Unemployment Rate: Is the government deliberately misclassifying job seekers? “Even with minor changes, the unemployment rate can change significantly. If only two million of the record 92.6 million Americans classified as not in the labor force really should be considered workforce members and therefore unemployed under consistently applied rules, the official unemployment rate would be more than a full percentage point higher. . . . The sudden September 2012 unemployment rate drop from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent was also highly suspect — and, coming just as early voting in that year’s presidential election began, quite convenient.”

Related: Denver Census Whistleblower: Unemployment Numbers Are Being Faked (Again).

PETER WEHNER: The President’s Emotional State Bears Watching. “One of the more interesting political/psychological pastimes these days is to watch how President Obama deals with his crumbling presidency. The answer is: Not well. . . . It’s in front of his donors that his most authentic feelings seem to surface, and it’s clear he’s becoming increasingly isolated, embittered, and thin skinned. His excuse making is now chronic and habitual. He’s even displaying some signs of paranoia. Everyone is against him. Obama is becoming Nixonian.”

ASHE SCHOW: Feminist hysteria is causing the infantilization of women.

This need to protect women from even reading or hearing about the ills of society has become so pervasive that some colleges are including “trigger warnings” on class syllabi to caution students that they might be offended or feel uncomfortable about some of the subject matter.

Even more detrimental to women than telling them words can hurt is the recent feminist trend of giving them mixed signals about sexuality. Modern feminists are arguing that it is “slut-shaming” to suggest that women should avoid drunken sex, but they also are pushing colleges to adopt a definition of rape in which women under the heavy influence of alcohol cannot give consent.

The perceived need to coddle women is not exclusive to liberals. In July, Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., told an audience of women that her male colleagues needed to bring the discussion “down to a woman’s level.” She meant that Republican men need to learn how to relate to women, but the implication was that women can’t understand things the way men can.

There are even bills in Congress codifying the new belief that women are delicate flowers who need help to succeed in this terrible, terrible country. These include equal-pay bills that don’t actually reduce the mythical wage gap but do serve to tell women they need help to become equal to menfolk; campus sex assault bills that tell women they can’t handle alcohol and that if they regret a drunken hookup they have been raped; and a slew of abortion bills claiming the procedure is about “women’s health.” . . .

This shift toward telling women they need help at every stage of their lives (remember the Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia”?) might raise funds for feminist causes or gain votes for politicians, but it’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing.

Women are fragile flowers who must be protected from all the stuff men deal with every day. Because equality!

ROLL CALL: Tom Cotton Pushes for Leadership in New TV Ad. “The statewide spot, part of the Cotton campaign’s $2.4 million TV buy for the final month of the race, features a portion of his August 2013 announcement speech in which the congressman argues for the state’s need for leadership in the Senate.”

THE TURKS ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS: U.S. frustration rises as Turkey withholds military help from besieged Kobane.

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s Dismal Performance Is His Personal Failure. “When George Bush asked for Rumsfeld’s resignation, it was because Bush had followed Rumsfeld’s advice, for better and worse, and knew a new direction was needed. Reagan asked chief of staff Donald Regan to resign during the Iran-Contra scandal because Reagan needed a new hatchet man to handle the crisis. A fresh team won’t have the same value in this case. As Panetta, Clinton, and Gates make clear in their memoirs, Obama wasn’t taking their advice anyway. It’s likely that he’s not listening to his current team any more than his previous team, except to the extent that they tell Obama what he wants to hear. The problem is, and has been, the man in the Oval Office.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Embattled House Democrats Turn Against Pelosi.

FLASHBACK: What An Ebola Quarantine Might Look Like.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Female Teacher Admits To Having Sex With Students.

HEADS NEED TO ROLL FOR THIS STUFF, AND I’M NOT SURE I MEAN FIGURATIVELY: EPA tells court it may have lost text messages.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.

“Defendant has decided to formally notify the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) about the potential loss of federal records relating to text messages,” the lawyers told the court.

Once it files that notice the CEI’s claim will become moot, since the records do not exist, the agency said. Lawyers will ask the court for a hearing to dismiss the case.

They told me if we elected Barack Obama, government would turn into a criminal enterprise. And they were right!

EVEN WITHOUT THE GLUT, I WOULDN’T INVEST IN NYC REAL ESTATE EARLY IN THE DEBLASIO ERA: The Coming Real Estate Glut.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loan Debt Crowding Out Mortgages For Young People.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Why So Serious?

LIKE SO MANY HAPPENINGS IN THIS ADMINISTRATION, IF YOU PUT THIS IN A NOVEL IT WOULD SEEM CRUDE AND UNREALISTIC: Obama slams billionaires at the home of a guy named Rich Richman. Who is . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . rich!

Unlike fiction, reality doesn’t have to be plausible. And boy howdy have we seen that these past few years. But this would be too heavy-handed for any editor:

Richman, who built his $10 billion company developing rental housing, lives in the Conyers Farm area, where the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Twenty-five donors paid $32,400 each to get their photo taken with the president. Others paid $10,000 for dinner.

While Obama was schmoozing — and the press pool was playing billiards in the basement — he was also soliciting donations for House Democrats in an e-mail.

“If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for,” Obama said. “Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”

Obama arrived from New York City — where he had attended a fundraiser with hedge-fund billionaires George Soros and Paul Tudor Jones — in a convoy of four helicopters that landed at the Greenwich Polo Club.

But not too heavy-handed for reality.

WAIT, THE WHITE HOUSE LIED? Aides knew of possible White House link to Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal. “As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved. But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged. . . . Office staffers who raised questions about a White House role said they were put on administrative leave as a punishment for doing so. Later, Edwards, the acting inspector general, resigned amid allegations of misconduct stemming in part from the dispute.”

Nobody tell Country Dick Montana.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Charges: Fired high school teacher in Austin may be carrying student’s child. A followup on the story I posted earlier today.