FROM MY COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON: LegalZoom Fought the North Carolina Bar — And LegalZoom Won.

For anyone interested in the changes in the legal market and legal education that are going on now, his book, Glass Half Full: The Decline And Rebirth of the Legal Profession, is required reading.

THE SILICON VALLEY SUICIDES. “Suicide clusters—defined as multiple deaths in close succession and proximity—feed on viral news, which feeds on social connections.”

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DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: College Presidents Grovel To Pampered Radicals At Mediocre, Absurdly Costly Private Schools:

The pampered students at America’s embarrassingly expensive second-rate liberal arts colleges are now attempting their own versions of the passionate protests over poop swastikas and reported racial abuse at the University of Missouri and the alleged slurs of “You filthy white piece of shit!” at Dartmouth College. Presidents at the schools are delighted to catch the flak.

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, a group called Oxy United for Black Liberation has pretended to occupy a campus building and issued a list of 14 demands, which includes “the immediate removal” of school president Jonathan Veitch and “mandatory” racial re-education workshops for all professors and employees.

* * * * * * *

The total cost of tuition, fees and room and board for a single year at Occidental is $63,194. That’s about 220 percent of the American per capita income of $28,155.

As Oscar Wilde famously said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” And no one would accuse Kurt Schlichter of having a heart of stone, either — which is why he is encouraging us to “Let’s All Laugh As Liberalism Commits Ritual Suicide On Campus:”

It’s beautiful how this conflict divides the liberals between the establishment and the students, and how it further subdivides two of their main establishment constituencies, academics and mainstream media journalists. For too long, both of these groups of hapless losers have been able to pretend to support free speech. Well, suckers, now it’s getting real. The little monsters you spawned don’t much like free-speech, and they want you to shut up too, not just us conservatives. Being academics and journalists, and therefore presumptively without spines, most of you guys will submit. A few of you won’t, and it will weaken your coalition when some number of your members walk away because they just can’t swallow your catering to these Junior Red Guards.

Conservatives should be loving this fight. We’re sitting on the sidelines and watching our enemies beat each other to a fussy pulp. This is a classic wedge issue because it splits our enemy apart like Abe Lincoln split rails. Yeah, there’s another dead white cis-het male reference you Mizzou morons won’t get.

“So, fellow freedom lovers, grab a bag of popcorn and a tumbler of scotch, because this is only going to get better and better.” Read the whole thing.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: WaPo: Two Clintons, 41 years, $3 billion: Inside the couple’s donor network.

VIDEO: Sixty Years Of National Review.

ISIS THREATENS NEW YORK CITY.

Related: “Cool clock, Ahmed.”

IT’S BEEN A PROBLEM FOR MANY, MANY YEARS, BUT IT SEEMS TO HAVE GOTTEN MUCH WORSE: Roll Call: Lawmakers Hit Secret Service on ‘Disturbing’ Culture.

On Sept. 30, the agency’s inspector general released a report confirming that Secret Service employees accessed and circulated House Oversight and Government Affairs Chairman Jason Chaffetz’s 2003 application for a job at the agency, after Chaffetz’s probe of mishaps at the Secret Service. The incident prompted Homeland Security subcommittees of jurisdiction from the House and Senate to hold a joint hearing.

“The American people deserve answers,” said Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency. “As disturbing as this incident is, it is only one example of other instances where Secret Service employees showed very poor judgment and leadership failed to act.”

Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy reiterated his apology for the incident Tuesday, and said it was unacceptable.

3-to-12-day suspensions aren’t enough. People should be losing their jobs for this.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: OBAMA WON’T READ INTELLIGENCE ON GROUPS HE DOESN’T CONSIDER TERRORISTS:

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” veteran journalist Sharyl Attkisson said her sources have told her that President Barack Obama does not want and will not read intelligence reports on groups “he does not consider terrorists,” despite being on a U.S. list of designated terrorists.

Attkisson said, “I have talked to people who have worked in the Obama administration who firmly believe he has made up his mind. I would say closed his mind, they say, to their intelligence that they’ve tried to bring him about various groups that he does not consider terrorists, even if they are on the U.S. list of designated terrorists. He has his own ideas, and there are those who’ve known him a long time who say this dates back to law school. He does not necessarily—you may think it’s a good trait you may think it’s a bad trait—he does not necessarily listen to the people with whom he disagrees. He seems to dig in. I would suppose because he thinks he’s right. He is facing formidable opposition on this particular point.”

The New York Times sounds like it grudgingly concurs with Attkisson’s assessment of our epistemically closed president, though you have to scroll down eight paragraphs deep past their deliberately underplayed headline, “In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame,” to find the story’s real lede:

A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.

“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”

As John Fund wrote last year, the eye of the narrative draws ever-tighter in the cloistered Obama White House:

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

To borrow from Gen. Flynn’s language, I wonder what else Obama and Jarrett “disregard” because “it doesn’t meet the narrative?”

WAIT, I THOUGHT AMERICANS WERE “WAR WEARY” AND JUST WANTED FREE HEALTH INSURANCE: NBC Poll: Americans Support Sending More Ground Troops to Fight Islamic State. “Roughly two-thirds of the country (65 percent) want more troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria to combat IS, which took responsibility for the attacks in Paris, France, last week that killed more than 120 people. When broken down by political party, a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and two-thirds of independents agree on sending more troops to combat the terrorist group.”

Related: Bloomberg Poll: Most Americans Oppose Syrian Refugee Resettlement. “Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults in the survey, conducted in the days immediately following the attacks, say the nation should not continue a program to resettle up to 10,000 Syrian refugees. Just 28 percent would keep the program with the screening process as it now exists, while 11 percent said they would favor a limited program to accept only Syrian Christians while excluding Muslims, a proposal Obama has dismissed as ‘shameful’ and un-American.”

ROGER SIMON: Should the State Department Be Disbanded?

Starring John Kerry and Hillary as Vladimir and Estragon — from “Waiting for Godot.”

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HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN STRATEGY REVOLVES AROUND HAVING A VAGINA, BUT OTHER WOMEN DON’T SEEM TO LIKE HER ALL THAT MUCH: Hillary Clinton Polling Badly Among Colorado Women.

Hillary Clinton is not well-liked by Colorado women, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

The poll found the former secretary of state trailing each of the top four GOP presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) by double digits.

Even worse news for Clinton, who is making her womanhood a central part of her campaign and won’t stop reminding people of her gender, is that women in Colorado prefer nearly every top GOP candidate to her.

I think she’ll have trouble making that up with votes from men. . . .

Plus: “Clinton does especially poorly among white women, who went for Carson 52 percent to Clinton’s 42 percent.” Those racists.

NOT TOM FRIEDMAN: A Conversation With a Cabbie and What It Tells Us About The Next Several Minutes of My Life.

THUGGERY: Clinton Goes after Laugh Factory Comedians for Making Fun of Her. “In what appears to be a first for a serious presidential contender, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going after five comedians who made fun of the former Secretary of State in standup skits at a popular Hollywood comedy club. . . . Masada told Judicial Watch that, as soon as the video got posted on the Laugh Factory website, he received a phone call from a ‘prominent’ person inside Clinton’s campaign. ‘He said the video was disgusting and asked who put me up to this,’ Masada said. The Clinton staffer, who Masada did not want to identify, also demanded to know the names and phone numbers of the comedians that appear in the video. Masada refused and hung up. He insists that the comedy stage is a sanctuary for freedom of speech no matter who is offended. ‘Just last night we had (Emmy-award winner) Dana Carvey doing Donald Trump and it was hilarious,’ Masada said.”

If only our college presidents were as committed to free speech as the owners of comedy clubs.

ONE OF THE LONGEST RUNNING CLIMATE PREDICTION BLUNDERS HAS DISAPPEARED FROM THE INTERNET: The London Independent quietly tosses their March 2000 article with the classic headline “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” down the memory hole, after years of being mocked.

THE HILL: Cruz to Obama: Insult me to my face.

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) challenged President Obama on Wednesday for attacking Republicans who oppose plans to admit thousands of Syrian refugees into the U.S.

“It is utterly unbefitting of the president to be engaging in those kind of personal insults and attacks,” Cruz said in Washington, D.C., in video captured by NBC News.

“He talked about how he was belittling the Republican field as scared. Well let me suggest something: Mr. President, if you want to insult me, you can do it overseas, you can do it in Turkey, you can do it in foreign countries. But I would encourage you Mr. President, come back and insult me to my face,” Cruz said.

Obama would never share a stage with Cruz. He couldn’t even handle Ben Carson.

HEADLINES FROM 1870, 1914 and 1940: Foreign Policy: France Is at War… With Germany.

THIS BLOG POST IS EXACTLY WHAT ISIS WANTS.

YEAH, SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT: Peter Wehner: Our Bitter And Graceless President.

We all know people of towering arrogance and we all know people of staggering incompetence, but Barack Obama is quite possibly the perfect package. No one on the scene today combines these two qualities in quite the same way as Mr. Obama.

On the incompetence side, and sticking just with the president’s policies and record in the greater Middle East, there is Mr. Obama’s mishandling of the rise of the Islamic State, which just last year he referred to as the “jayvee team” and just last week declared was “contained.” Recall his threat to Syrian President Assad that if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people it would constitute crossing a “red line” (Assad did and Obama did nothing), and his stop-start-stop support for opposition forces in Syria.

Then there is the president’s decision to pull out all American troops from Iraq, which had disastrous consequences; his failures in Afghanistan (including announcing a withdrawal date even as he was announcing a surge in troops); his bungled relations with Egypt; his failure to support the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which Charles Krauthammer called “the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.” Add to that Mr. Obama declaring his policies in Libya, Yemen and Somalia to be models of success before things collapses in all three countries, his alienation and mistreatment of Israel, and his botched handling of relations with our Arab allies – not to mention policies that have allowed Russia a presence in the Middle East unlike any its had since Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in the early 1970s – and you have a catastrophic foreign policy record. It was only in the summer of last year that the Wall Street Journal reported, “The breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s” – and things are more disordered, chaotic and violent now then it was then. Things are so bad that the president has even lost CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

You’d think that this would have instilled at least a small measure of humility, but no such luck.

ISIS: Sharm el-Sheikh Soda-Can Bomb Plot Originally Targeted Western Airliner.

THOSE RACIST DEMOCRATS: Pro-Hillary Mayor Makes The Most Shocking Argument Yet For Denying Syrian Refugees. “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

LESS DRAMA, MORE OUTLINING: Student Found Bound And Gagged At Law School Faked Her Own Kidnapping.

DONATED BLOOD AGAIN TODAY: We had the Blue/Orange blood drive. I don’t know how Kentucky is doing, but turnout was poor in Knoxville today because of bizarre weather. But I made it.