YEAH, I DON’T THINK THE ADMINISTRATION CARES MUCH ABOUT THAT: Border Patrol Agents Say Agency’s Gun Recall Puts Them In Danger.

BIPARTISAN OPPOSITION: Menendez, Kirk Vow to ‘Act Decisively’ If White House Forges Bad Deal with Iran.

HAND IN GLOVE: Google Subsidiary Leases NASA’s Moffett Field, Historic Hangar for $1.2 Billion. “Planetary Ventures will invest more than $200 million in the 1,000-acre (405 hectares) property, which also includes Hangar Two and Hangar Three, two runways, a flight-operations building, and a private golf course. The company will refurbish all three hangars and use them as research facilities in an attempt to develop new technologies in space exploration, robotics and other high-tech fields, NASA officials said. Planetary Ventures will also establish a facility on the site that will teach the public about MFA’s historical significance.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Action-Packed Video Games Really Do Make Us Learn Faster.

YEAH, I THINK ANY SORT OF MASS SURGERY IS PROBABLY A BAD IDEA: Botched Mass Sterilization in India Kills 10 Women.

RON FOURNIER: ObamaCare’s Foundation Of Lies.

REALLY? BECAUSE WHEN OBAMA KISSED THAT NURSE, I FIGURED EVERYTHING WAS SETTLED: Remember Ebola? It’s Still A Huge Problem.

HEY, COOL, WE JUST LANDED ON A COMET: Rosetta mission makes space history: The landing marks a historic triumph for the European Space Agency — and for humanity as a whole.

Well, this is the 21st Century, you know.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 552.

SIMPLE POLICIES WIN ELECTIONS:

Michael Kinsley once famously defined a gaffe as when a politician says what he or she truly believes (i.e., “a gaffe occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth”), a formulation so iconic that it is now known in the trade as a “Kinsley Gaffe.” A special subcategory of Kinsley Gaffe is becoming more common in these days of ubiquitous personal electronics: “accidentally telling the truth without knowing a camera or a tape recorder was running.” This is the category where we’d put Obama’s remarks about “bitter” working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and Mitt Romney’s complaint about “the 47 percent.”

Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, has now made two such gaffes: once, when he insisted it was ridiculous to think that anyone could ever have thought that subsidies would only be available on state exchanges, only to be confronted with one audio and one video clip of himself saying that very thing in 2012. And again yesterday, when footage surfaced of Gruber making some awkward remarks about the design of Obamacare at a an event a year ago in Philadelphia. . . .

This is undoubtedly true, and critics of the law have been saying as much for years. Nor is it only true of Obamacare. As Steve Teles of Johns Hopkins has been arguing for a while, the American system increasingly favors byzantine laws that do things in complicated, opaque ways rather than better, simpler, more transparent ways. We prefer 1,000 tax credits to a few direct subsidies, mandates rather than government provision, hidden costs rather than direct ones. Teles calls this “kludgeocracy,” and not in an affectionate way.

A good argument can be made that Obama has gone further down this road than most, in part because he favored big technocratic bills that aimed to do a lot of everything that experts and the party base wanted done, rather than simpler and more targeted initiatives.

The fact that we have a lousy media makes it worse.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Real Student Debt Problem No One is Talking About. “Graduate students make up just 14% of university enrollment, but account for nearly 40% of student debt.”

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EXPLOSIVE CHARGES: Black Democrat Alleges Racism in Lawsuit against Ohio Democratic Party: State rep. says there is a “plantation-style management of black public officials” in the state.

CONRAD BLACK ON plea bargains and prosecutorial overreach.

I’ve said the same sorts of things myself, of course.

ANOTHER PICKUP: AP Calls Alaska Senate Race for Sullivan. Two thoughts: (1) AoSHQDD called this a week ago; and (2) If the Gruber video had come out before the election, would the GOP have picked up Virginia and New Hampshire? Quite possibly.

ROLL CALL: How Elise Stefanik Became The Youngest Woman Ever Elected To Congress.

Rep.-elect Elise Stefanik’s path to victory in New York reflected the trajectory of the midterms nationally, as Republicans invaded Democratic territory to make double-digit gains in the House.

But in so many other ways, Stefanik’s dominant win was one of her own making.

Stefanik defeated a wealthy Democrat, Aaron Woolf, by more than 20 points in a district the president carried just a couple years ago. At 30 years old, she’s the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and New York Republicans now tout her as the future of their party.

But that’s nowhere close to where Stefanik started the cycle in the upstate wilderness.

In late summer 2013, she drove an F-150 truck to methodically meet local Republican leaders in the vast district represented by a popular Democrat, Bill Owens.

“I had this 29-year-old political unknown who was introducing herself as willing to challenge an entrenched political incumbent,” recalled Ray Scollin, Chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party, who found Stefanik on Twitter before meeting her in a Saranac Lake coffee shop last year. “I know a lot of people who thought of it as laughable.”

The GOP had been burned before when factions failed to coalesce behind the same candidate in the North Country. The Empire State’s 21st District is one of the largest on the East Coast, extending from the Canadian border to north of Albany. From there, it’s faster to drive round-trip to Manhattan than traverse the district filled with scenic lakes, forests and struggling manufacturing plants.

Stefanik spent her days working for her family’s plywood company, checking her gmail in between stops and carrying a handful of palm cards to the smallest of GOP functions.

“She put well over 100,000 miles on that truck,” recalled Stefanik’s ad-maker, Russ Schriefer. “She’d drive five hours to meet with a half-a-dozen people.”

Retail politics. Hard to imagine, say, Hillary — even a 29-year-old Hillary — doing anything like that.

A FIELD MARSHAL IN THE ARMY OF DAVIDS: Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Adviser Who’s Humiliating the Administration Over Obamacare.

Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething’s five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits. . . .

He’s also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA’s subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that’s currently headed to the Supreme Court.

A few days ago, Weinstein pulled a short clip from Gruber’s year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference. As a crowd murmured with laughter, Gruber explained that the process that created the ACA was, by necessity, obfuscated to pull one over on voters.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the America voter, or whatever.”

Weinstein’s scoop went around the world in a hurry.

As it should have. Nice work. Imagine if we had actual journalists doing this sort of thing.

MAYBE BECAUSE THE ECONOMY ISN’T ACTUALLY GETTING MUCH BETTER? The economy is getting better. So why are shoppers still hunting for rock-bottom prices?

HOPEY-CHANGEY: The Hill: Business groups brace for deluge of post-election regulations.

Business groups are bracing for an onslaught of regulations, with the Obama administration bent on completing a host of the president’s unfinished policy goals and the midterm elections now in the rearview mirror.

Agencies across federal government are expected to drop a host of major rules over the next few months, with regulations running the gamut from calorie label requirements on restaurant menus to new rules for hydraulic fracturing and air pollution.

There are at roughly two dozen major rules that are scheduled to drop between now and late January, according to a review of the administration’s official regulatory agenda and rules now awaiting approval at the White House.

Idea: Rules enacted in the year after an election should have to be proposed before the election.

IN CONSULTATION WITH JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, Minneapolis Public Schools Set Racial Quotas For Discipline. “Moving forward, every suspension of a black or brown student will be reviewed by the superintendent’s leadership team. The school district aims to more deeply understand the circumstances of suspensions with the goal of providing greater supports to the school, student or family in need. This team could choose to bring in additional resources for the student, family and school. . . . MPS must aggressively reduce the disproportionality between black and brown students and their white peers every year for the next four years. This will begin with a 25 percent reduction in disproportionality by the end of this school year; 50 percent by 2016; 75 percent by 2017; and 100 percent by 2018.”

Another reason to avoid the public schools.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Lazy’ and ‘self-serving’ board governance is ruining higher ed, commission says. “Dysfunctional governance of America’s higher education institutions has made the public skeptical that their leadership is contributing to the country’s well-being, according to a report commissioned by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.”

BARACK OBAMA: ‘I am big. It’s the electorate that got small.’

GENETICALLY, your cat is pretty much a wild animal.

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